"Poor boy! hard to have neither father nor mother. It was twelve years ago when you spent that season in London with the Squire," said Christabel, calculating profoundly with the aid of her finger tips; "and Angus Hamleigh was then sixteen, which makes him now eight-and-twenty--dreadfully old. And since then he has been at Oxford--and he got the Newdigate--what is the Newdigate?--and he did not hunt, or drive tandem, or have rats in his rooms, or paint the doors vermilion--like--like the general run of young men," said Christabel, reddening, and hurrying on confusedly; "and he was altogether rather a superior person at the university." "He had not your cousin Leonard's high spirits and powerful physique," said Mrs. Tregonell, as if she were ever so slightly offended. "Young men's tastes are so different." "Yes," sighed Christabel, "it's lucky they are, is it not? It wouldn't do for them _all_ to keep rats in their rooms, would it? The poor old colleges would smell so dreadful. Well," with another sigh, "it is just three weeks since Angus Hamleigh accepted your invitation to come here to stay, and I have been expiring of curiosity ever since. If he keeps me expiring much longer I shall be dead before he comes. And I have a dreadful foreboding that, when he does appear, I shall detest him." "No fear of that," said Miss Bridgeman, the owner of the voice that issued now and again from the covert of a deep armchair on the other side of the fireplace. "Why not, Mistress Oracle?" asked Christabel. "Because, as Mr. Hamleigh is accomplished and good-looking, and as you see very few young men of any kind, and none that are particularly attractive, the odds are fifty to one that you will fall in love with him." "I am not that kind of person," protested Christabel, drawing up her long full throat, a perfect throat, and one of the girl's chief beauties. "I hope not," said Mrs. Tregonell; "I trust that Belle has better sense than to fall in love with a young man, just because he happens to come to stay in the house." Christabel was on the point of exclaiming, "Why, Auntie, you did it;" but caught herself up sharply, and cried out instead, with an air of settling the question for ever. "My dear Jessie, he is eight-and-twenty. Just ten years older than I am." "Of course--he's ever so much too old for her. A _blasé_ man of the world," said Mrs. Tregonell. "I should be deeply sorry to see my darling marry a man of that age--and with such antecedents. I should like her to marry a young man not above two or three years her senior." "And fond of rats," said Jessie Bridgeman to herself, for she had a shrewd idea that she knew the young man whose image filled Mrs. Tregonell's mind as she spoke.