The old secretary's countenance for this fateful moment is one brilliant, if wicked phantasmagoria, in which the ghosts of long sustained thoughts appear and disappear, going from fear and its brother, hatred, to lasting revenge. Then all vanish; the usual soddened look returns to the man's face; he opens the door, and once more, instead of the evil genius he looked a second ago, a broken-down, drunken old creature crosses the threshold, shambles over the hall, and is lost presently amongst the many passages. * * * * * Meantime, _ennui_ is reigning triumphantly in the drawing-room, more conspicuously in the case of Dulce. "Hey-day," she says, with a little, idle yawn; "how I do wish everybody would not go out shooting, all at once. I think they might take it by turns. But all men are selfish; they never consider how lonely we may be." "Why should one miss them?" says Julia, who in her soul considers every moment unoccupied by the society of a man (that is a possible lover) as time misspent. "I don't know," says Dulce, candidly; "I am only sure of this, that I want them always." Portia says nothing. "Well, certainly, at times they are amusing," says Mrs. Beaufort, as though just awaking to the fact that now and again one _can_ find a man with some wit or humor in him--"and I honestly confess"--with a little laugh and a great assumption of candor--"that I wish even Stephen Gower would drop in now and help us to pass away an hour or two." "_Even_ Stephen Gower!" repeats Dulce. "Julia, what has that poor young man done to you, that you should speak thus meanly of him? _Even_, what an unkind word!" "I don't believe I quite meant it, do you know," says Julia, relenting. "I like Stephen Gower very much. By-the-by, what do you think of him? I never yet heard you express an opinion, good or bad, about him. Do it now." Leaning back in her chair, Dulce slowly and thoughtfully raises her arms in the air, with her fingers tipping each other, until presently they fall indolently behind her head, where she lets them lie. "Well, let me see," she says, lazily, "I think, perhaps, like Chaucer's man, he is a 'veray parfit gentil knight.'" Portia lifts her eyes from her painting and turns them slowly upon her cousin; she regards her very silently for a moment or two, and then she smiles, and leaning forward, opens her lips. "'And of his port as meke as is a mayde,'" she says, mischievously, purposely choosing the same poet for her quotation that Dulce had taken for hers. Miss Blount laughs. "You, too, are severe upon our neighbor," she says, defending him more from obstinacy than from real desire to see justice done. "I confess he is at times a trifle too mild, but not effeminate, surely?" "He is very handsome," says Portia, evasively. "He has a charming mouth," says Dulce.