“I heard of your downer, old ’un,” this agreeable young gentleman observed with great cordiality, transferring his attention from Miss Lushington to myself. “Wasn’t out myself that day; couldn’t raise a prad, or I’d have seen you picked up, and dissected, and all that. First day I can get away from home, says I, I’ll just tool over and visit the mutilated sportsman. Thought you’d be dull, you know, with nobody but Miss Lushington, though she’s pleasant company too when she’s got her stockings on right-side-in.” “Come, that’s a good one,” observed the lady alluded to thus familiarly, with a meaning glance. “As if you didn’t know of our late arrival! Oh, you’re a deep one, Mr. Plumtree, you are!” The young gentleman blushed, a real honest shame-faced blush, such as I did not believe could have been raised, after six years of Eton and two of Oxford, to save a man’s life. “Get out!” said he, chivalrously ignoring the cause of his confusion. “None of your chaff, Miss L. Ain’t I always ready to help a lame dog over a stile? Wouldn’t I drive a hundred miles in a butcher’s cart without springs, to succour a mutilated friend? Ain’t I pitiful, and tender, and soft-hearted? Come, you know I am.” “Indeed I know nothing of the kind,” replied the lady, bridling and tossing her head. It was Miss Lushington’s plan, you see, always to give her admirer what she called a “set-down” the moment they passed an imaginary line of her own demarcation; so she proceeded, speaking very distinctly, and with her lips set tight— “If you’ve driven all this way only to talk nonsense to me, Mr. Plumtree, you’ve wasted your time sadly. But you’ll never make me believe _that_. _I_ know what I know; and others might know it too, if so be as you was to take and rile me more than I think pleasant. And you’re too late, after all,” added Miss L. viciously. “She was in the fly an hour before you drove into the yard: why, bless you! she’s at the top of the hunt by this time, and no more chance of coming up with her than if she was the wind.” Without pausing to consider what peculiar position in the chase Miss Lushington intended to convey by her expression of the “top of the hunt,” I shot a glance at Young Plumtree, who seemed, I thought, to quail considerably under the volubility he had provoked. Indeed, strange to say, he appeared completely “shut up,” and at a loss for a reply. A horrible suspicion darted across me, lighting up, as such fancies do, the previous darkness with a dazzling and momentary brilliance. Could this unwelcome and unhappy young man be under the influence of a hopeless attachment for Miss Merlin,—one of those unaccountable infatuations of which we read in novels, but which, fortunately for the general comfort of society, we so seldom meet with in real life?