Towards the end of April she was alone in Charles Street, preparing the house for Lady Maria's return from Rome. Ingram was still at Wanless, grumbling through his duties of magistrate, landlord, and county gentleman. “They seem to think up here that a fellow has nothing to do but 'take the chair,'” he wrote. “I can tell you I'm pretty sick of it, and fancy that they will be before long. I'm an awkward customer when I'm bored--as I am now, damnably.” She sent him matter-of-fact replies, and wrote principally of the weather. The Pole continued his discreet and temperate wooing after the plan he had formulated. He strove to interest her perpetually, never left her without having, as he taught himself to believe, impressed himself anew upon her imagination. Watching her as a cat a mouse, he learned to read her by signs so slight that no one who had not the intuition of a woman could have seen them at all. Unfortunately for him, he misinterpreted what he read. The slap-dash Ingram thought all was well; Chevenix, the more observant, thought there was a bare chance; Morosine alone could see how her quivering soul was being bruised, and if he thought that she looked to him for balm, he may be excused. She was drowning, she held out her hands. To whom, but to him upon the bank? How should he know what shadow stood behind him, with praise in his dim eyes for a “dear obsequious head”? Playing deputy to Senhouse, little as he guessed it, he devoted himself to bracing her for the match, having made up his mind that there was no other way of making her happiness his own. His mistress she might be, his wife never. As he read her, she would keep the letter of the law--since the law required it of her. The rest, he flattered himself, might be left to time and him. His present aim was to interest and stimulate her, without alarming. He counted greatly upon some sudden emotional stimulus, which would cause her to fall to him; and one came, though it had no such effect.