"Miss Laurence engaged to your brother?" she repeated, without noticing the latter part of Mr Thurston's speech. "How very strange! Somehow I feel as if I could hardly believe it--having seen her so lately, only the--night before last--" she hesitated. After all, she must have been completely mistaken in her estimate of that girl's character. She must be a flirt indeed, and not a very desirable sort of a flirt either, even according to Roma's not very stringent notions on these subjects, to have looked up into any man's face, be he never so charming, with those bright innocent smiles of hers, in the sort of way she had looked up into Beauchamp's, knowing herself to be engaged to another. And a clergyman, too! Somehow the latter fact seemed to Roma to aggravate the unbecomingness of her dancing half the evening with him, and the still more marked "sitting out," all of which Roma had explained by her extreme inexperience and youth, finding any other theory untenable in the presence of that buoyant girlish bearing, those lovely, honest, unsuspicious eyes. "I think I had fallen a little in love with her myself," thought Roma. "But if she is really engaged, it is a great relief on Beauchamp's account, and indirectly on my own. For Gertrude may be as incredulous as she likes--it is not often he will come across a girl like that, and more than half in love with him already, as, engaged or not engaged, I am _certain_ she is." But when she had reached this point in her meditations, she became aware that Mr Thurston was looking at her in some perplexity, waiting for her to finish her uncompleted sentence. How could she finish it? She could not tell him what she was thinking, that his brother was very much to be pitied, and that Miss Laurence was by no means "what she seemed," but that on all accounts, _her_ own and Captain Chancellor's included, the sooner they were married the better. "What a complication," thought Roma, "and how odd that this complete stranger, this Mr Thurston, or rather his brother, should be mixed up in my private affairs in this roundabout way." She felt a silly sort of inclination to burst out laughing: it made her feel nervous to see him sitting there looking at her, waiting for her to speak. Why did he want so much to hear what she had to say? She could not understand the look of restrained eagerness in her face. She must say something.