She still hesitated, tearful and in doubt, but quickly surrendered to his insistence, and went beside him submissively. He led her by a circuitous route to the great wicket of the place, where it stood in a blaze of flambeaux facing the dining-hall; and there outside waited a throng of chairs and vehicles, the most having brought visitors, but among them several hackney coaches, driven over, as they might be to-day, on the chance of a fare. And into one of these Hamilton bundled his charge, having first settled with the coachman; and he sent her off with his blessing, smiling on her timid benedictions. And then he turned his back on the gate, and smacked his chest with ineffable unction, and threw a glance at the sky, as if to observe if the recording angel were there making a note. Yet, what if the girl had been pretty?--but he shall have the benefit of the doubt. He strolled back the length of the lighted building, savouring by the way his own laudableness; and, coming presently to the starry, tree-haunted sward beyond, was aware in one instant of a lady, with an emerald bow in her bosom, standing fanning herself apart near a rhododendron thicket, and of a cavalier, whose hat was adorned with an apple-green scarf, striding across the grass to join her. He was so near the two that he was able, unobserved, to slip, though with a little jump of the heart, behind a tree-trunk, within earshot of the coming colloquy. The gentleman walked up to the lady, and bowed, and stood silent. She responded with the minutest toss of her head, and remained as mute. She fanned herself, he whistled. “Hem!” said he. “Hem!” said she. Hamilton chuckled, though in an exasperated way. “By the lord,” he thought, “if ’tis not my cousin Kate and Phil! And I perceive what is their game, which is for each to make the other speak first.” He watched like a cat. “Hem!” coughed the lady again, and “Hem!” coughed the gentleman, only more aggressively. At that moment a second lady, having a green bow at her bosom, came rapidly from the direction of the gate, and, passing across the observer’s near field of vision, went on and vanished among the trees. She was seen both by him and by the stationary lady, who started ever so slightly; Chesterfield, having his back to the flitting figure, stood unmoved. “I think,” said the lady, in an odd, repressed little voice, and seeming to make up her mind of a sudden, “that you have made a mistake.” Chesterfield uttered a sort of triumphant snarl. “No, by God!” said he. “I have made no mistake. And now acknowledge, madam, that you have been the first to break the silence between us.” “What, then?” she protested. “You have made a mistake, I say. Whoever you may think me, I am not she.” Now Hamilton, struck with an idea, had been privily, during these few moments, pinning his own scarf about his hat. And at these words he came from his ambush.