As the three sportsmen clanked along the carpeted passage to the drawing-room, they heard the notes of a pianoforte sounding from that apartment, and Mr. Sawyer had barely time to summon all his fortitude, for the subversion of his constitutional shyness, ere he found himself ushered into that sanctuary, in the wake of the Honourable Crasher, whom, truth to tell, just at that moment, he felt he would have followed with less apprehension over another locked gate, or treacherous “oxer.” It was not so formidable an undertaking, after all. There were but two ladies, and both seemed delighted at the acquisition of visitors on so dull a morning. The introductions were got over, none the worse that nobody knew the stranger’s name; and both Mrs. Dove, an ample lady, with the remains of considerable beauty, and “My daughter Cecilia,” of whom more anon, seemed resolved to make themselves agreeable to their guests—Mamma rather inclining to the Honourable Crasher, who was an old friend, and had often dropped in to luncheon before; whilst the siren Cecilia, fresh from the execution of that “sweet thing” they had heard on the pianoforte, seemed willing to devote herself to the amusement and possible subjugation of the stranger. There are some men on whom young ladies feel instinctively they are but wasting their time, and it is curious how seldom their perceptions deceive them on this point. Of such was the Honourable C. Good-looking, amiable, to all appearance well-off, and not over-burdened with brains, he possessed all the attributes of an “eligible _parti_” and yet somehow the most match-making of mothers, and the most enterprising of daughters, always gave him up as a bad job, after the first ten minutes. There was something about him that betrayed to female shrewdness he was not “a marrying man,” and as they judiciously abstain from playing a game in which the loss is not exclusively on the side of the adversary, they let him alone accordingly. Now, it was otherwise with Mr. Sawyer. Although you and I would have voted him a confirmed bachelor, might even have judged him uncharitably as somewhat rough and unpolished and unrefined, might have scouted the idea of his being in any respect “a ladies’ man,” and laughed outright at his competing with such a double-distilled dandy as the Honourable C., we should thus have only exposed our ignorance of the secret springs and impulses that move that mysterious piece of mechanism—the female mind. Miss Dove, in the absence of any other and nobler game, had not the slightest objection to exercise the different weapons in her armoury on her Mamma’s friend’s friend.