The bell rang, and the knocker added its emphatic summons. One of Rothwell's dogs began to bark. Kate had risen, and stood with her eyes fixed on her brother's face. "It would be a very good thing for the girl," she remarked meditatively. "I don't see what is to become of her, poor thing, unless she marries." "Damn him!" said Rothwell. The answer was not so irrelevant as it appeared. His gaze was as steady as Kate's own, and seemed to prolong his words as a singer prolongs a note. She drew her brows together, as if perplexed. "Well," she said, turning away, "I must go and look after our lovers!" "And I," he said. The dapper, contented little man had done Rothwell no harm, but the young fellow cherished a black hatred, born of the dulness of his vacant life. Hayes, without being rich, was very comfortably off, and he was apt to betray the fact with innocent ostentation. A sovereign was less to him than a shilling to John Rothwell, and it seemed to the latter that he could always hear the gold chinking when Hayes talked. One could do so much with a sovereign, and so little with a shilling. Rothwell was hungry, with a hunger which only just fell short of being a literal fact, and he had to stand by, with his hands in his empty pockets, while Hayes could have good dinners, good wine, good clothes, good horses, whatever he liked in the way of pleasure--and was "such a contemptible little cad with it all," the young man snarled. His own poverty would have been more bearable had it not been for his neighbour's ease and security. And now, heaven be praised!--heaven?--the prosperous man had set his heart on this whitefaced, fair-haired, foolish girl who was under the roof of Mitchelhurst Place, and for once he should be baffled. Rothwell set to work with evil ingenuity--it seemed almost fiendish, but, really, he had nothing else to do--to ruin Hayes's chance of success. But for him it must have been almost a certainty. Kate was inclined to favour the suitor. The old squire disliked him, perhaps with a little of his son's feeling, but would have been very well satisfied to see the girl provided for. And Minnie Newton was there for any man, who had a will of his own, and was not absolutely repulsive, to take if he pleased. The course of true love seemed about to run with perfect smoothness till young Rothwell stepped in and troubled it.