"If you don't like to do it yourself, I'll do it for you," pursues her brother, making a magnanimously handsome offer. "I would say to him, 'My dear fellow, it is no good, she does not seem to care about you,' as soon as look at him." "What a delicate way of breaking the news!" cries Esther, ironically. "Commend me to a man for gentle _finesse_." "I don't believe in _breaking_ news," replies Jack, sturdily. "If you were to go off in a fit, or the bay colt was to break his leg, or anything to go wrong, I'd far sooner people would tell me so without any humming and hawing and keeping me on the tenter hooks. Breaking news is like half cutting your throat before you are hanged, making you die two deaths instead of one." "But suppose I do seem to care a little about him?" suggests Esther, blushing furiously, but holding up her head bravely, and looking straight at her brother. "Suppose the cow jumped over the moon," replies Jack with incredulity. "I don't know whether the cow has accomplished her feat, but I have accomplished mine," says Esther, trying to make her face as brass, and failing signally. Jack puts up his hand, and strokes the future birthplace of his moustache, to hide an unavoidable smile. "I don't wish to be rude," he says; "but may I ask, since when? Was it a week ago, or less, that you requested me to accompany you on one of your joint excursions to that everlasting wood, and told me you thought your watch wanted cleaning, the time seemed to go so slow?" "A week!" cries his sister, indignantly. "Three weeks, or a month, at least." "Wrong, Essie, wrong; it was this day fortnight, Ryvel Horse Fair, which was the reason why I had to decline your invitation." "What does a week one way or another signify?" she cries, becoming irrational, as a worsted woman mostly does. "Nothing to a woman or a--weathercock." This last insult is too much for Miss Craven. "I see you are determined to turn me into ridicule; I see you don't believe me!" she cries, preparing to rush from the room like a tornado. "My good Essie," says Jack, jumping up, taking her two hands, and manfully repressing his inclination to laugh--"here I am; tell me _anything_, and I'll swear by the tomb of my grandmother to believe it." "Why should not I like him? What is there in him so hateful as to make my being fond of him incredible?" asks Essie, unreasonable and sobbing. "Nothing that I know of--except his _boots_, and you told me _they_ were--" "So they are," she says, smiling through her tears--"more than hateful; they haunt one like a bad dream." "He is not the least penitent about them, I can tell you: only yesterday he showed them me with ungodly glee, told me he had got them at Hugh Hughes's, at Naullan, and advised me to go and do likewise." "But--but--his boots are not he; he is not his boots, I mean," remarks Miss Craven, with meek suggestion; "mercifully, they are separable."