This attempt to repeat his own love-history, with Durant for the hero and Sarah Jane for the heroine, seemed to throw ridicule and debasement upon the little romance of which, up to this moment, he had been almost proud. It seemed to place Sarah Jane on the same level with her sister, a suggestion which fired him to fury. For there was just so much truth in it as made the suggestion intolerable. To the eyes of the world, perhaps, even to his mother and sister, there might seem no difference between Nancy and Sarah Jane; and he himself might seem to others to make as ridiculous a figure as he would feel Durant to make had he fallen a victim to the other girl’s attractions. The feeling that this was so, though he would not allow it in words, haunted him, as it were, underground, in the bottom of his heart, and made him more angry than anything had yet done. He would not allow it to be put into words even within his mind, but it had flashed across him, and could not now be annihilated; he himself must appear to others as contemptible, as idiotical as he would have felt Durant to be had he wanted to marry Sarah Jane. And this idea brought all his native world before him, his mother and sister, who, no doubt, by this time had heard Durant’s account, and were talking it over, as women do, going over and over it, and coming back to it again and again. He could see them in the large rooms of the house in town, where they had come hastily from the country on hearing all this, and where he had been summoned to meet them, though he had refused to go. How different those rooms were from Mrs. Bates’ parlour! It would have been strange indeed if the contrast had not struck him. He saw in imagination the two anxious faces close to each other in the wider horizon of their life and surroundings, the spacious quiet, the order and refinement which he had grown almost out of acquaintance with. What story would Durant tell, what account would he give? Would he place Nancy on a level with the others of her family, or was he sufficiently clever to perceive the vast difference between them? Arthur could not tell. If Durant had, indeed, walked and talked voluntarily with Sarah Jane, was it possible that he could perceive the infinite superiority of Nancy? His lip curled with the true stage sneer. He was ready to have laughed the “Ha, ha!” the bitter laugh of conventional ridicule and despair. It was long now since he had paid any attention to the reading which was his supposed object, and he rushed hastily upstairs to his room when he entered the house of Mr. Eagles. It was a large, handsome, old-fashioned house. He went upstairs, glad that all the doors were closed, and that there was nobody to meet him on the stairs to ask him unpleasant questions. Mr. Eagles had said something to him on the day before which had offended Arthur, but which he had been half inclined to laugh at; but he did not laugh now. Out of his own