“And I did _not_, my dear aunt,” answered Roderick, promptly; “I give you my word of honour as a gentleman.” “Nor any other place of worship,” thought the heir, as his aunt nodded approvingly. And then there was a little more talk, chiefly taking the form of a catechism, which Mr. Lowther went through triumphantly, since his answers to the old lady’s inquiries were shaped in accordance with his knowledge of what was likely to please his aunt, rather than with any reference to actual fact. But a man must do a good many mean things when he devotes himself to the cultivation of a narrow-minded maiden aunt, for the chance of inheriting small tenements and first-preference bonds in flourishing railway companies. Roderick Lowther breathed a long sigh of relief when he left the house that smelt like a tomb behind him, after drinking a glass of his aunt’s dry sherry, which act of devotion was in itself no small penance. He hailed a hansom as soon as he was safely beyond ken of the observant spinster, and was rattled back to his brother’s lodgings, where he found Harcourt pondering moodily over the “Times” newspaper, and whence the same hansom drove the two Antipholi to Stuccoville. Mr. Tredethlyn was out, but Mrs. Tredethlyn was at home. Harcourt went into his friend’s study to write a note; while Roderick followed a servant to the drawing-rooms, in the smallest and cosiest of which three gorgeous apartments the diplomatist found Maude and Rosa seated side by side on a low sofa, while proud Julia meditated apart at the window. “You’re the lady I should like to marry,” thought Roderick, as he looked at Julia’s dark face, which lighted up for a moment with her flashing smile, as she bowed to him, and then relapsed into gloom; “there’d be some pleasure in taming _you_. Who would care to cage a robin? but there would be some glory in subduing the spirit of an eagle.” Thus mused Mr. Lowther, while he murmured some commonplace remark upon the beauty of the summer day, and dropped himself lazily into a seat near Maude Tredethlyn. He was true to his tactics of the night before, and addressed his remarks almost entirely to Maude and Julia. When he did condescend to address the vivacious Rosa, he did so in a manner that was a delicate admixture of the intellectual bearishness of one of poor Miss Brontés heroes with the lively banter of a Benedick. The result of this policy was triumphant, and the market-gardener’s daughter plunged deeper and deeper still into her five-and-twentieth hopeless attachment. While Mr. Lowther the elder was cultivating his own interests in the drawing-room, Mr. Lowther the younger was pacing up and down Francis Tredethlyn’s study in no happy frame of mind. Imagine the feelings of a Mephistopheles who begins to suspect that his victim has slipped away from him. Harcourt was beginning to feel very doubtful as to the firmness of his hold on his pupil and companion.