Vanbrugh glanced at her face and thought she was a little pale. He remembered the conversation when they had been left together in the library after John Darche's trial, and was glad that he had then spoken cautiously, for he connected her change of colour with himself, by a roundabout and complicated reasoning more easy to be understood than to explain. "Perhaps she has," he said coolly. "But I do not think it is probable." "Mr. Brett does not go to see her any more." "Really? Are you sure of that, Miss Maylands?" "Marion has noticed it. She spoke to me of it yesterday. I wondered--" "What?" "Whether there had been any misunderstanding. I suppose that is what I was going to say." She blushed quickly, as she had turned pale a moment before. "You see," she continued rather hurriedly, "people who have once misunderstood one another may do the same thing again. Say, for instance, that he vaguely hinted at marriage--men have such vague ways of proposing--" "Have they?" "Of course--and that Marion did not quite realise what he meant, and turned the conversation, and that Mr. Brett took that for a refusal and went away, and lost his appetite, and all that--would it not account for it?" "Yes," assented Vanbrugh with a smile. "It might account for it--though Harry Brett is not a school girl of sixteen." "Meaning that I am, I suppose," retorted Dolly, anxious to get away from the subject which she had not chosen, and to lead Vanbrugh up to what she would have called the chaffing point. But he was not in the humour for that. "No," he said quietly. "I did not mean that." And he relapsed into silence for a time. He was thinking the matter over, and he was also asking himself whether, after all, he should not ask Dolly Maylands to marry him, though he was so much older than she. That was a possibility which had presented itself to his mind very often of late, and from time to time he determined to solve the question in one way or the other, and be done with it. But when he wished to decide it, he found it capable of only two answers; either he must offer himself or not. Sometimes he thought he would and then he fancied that he ought to prepare Dolly for so grave a matter by giving up chaff when they were together. But the first attempt at putting this resolution into practice was a failure whenever he tried it. Chaff was Dolly's element,--she pined when she was deprived of it. The serious part of her nature lay deep, and there were treasures there, hidden far below the bright tide of rippling laughter. Such treasures are sometimes lost altogether because no one discovers them, or because no one knows how to bring them to the surface.