"Your uncle is quite right, Muriel," said Ethel. "Mr. Holt does gossip. Besides, he is not the sort of person a young girl should quote." "You quote him, Aunt Ethel--often." "Your aunt," said Preston, "is not a young girl. Mr. Stainton is younger than Holt, I dare say, for he has evidently taken good care of himself, and Holt never takes care of anything, least of all his health." The air of importance that her uncle and aunt seemed to attach to so trivial a matter as a few years more or less in the age of any man past thirty puzzled Muriel, and she betrayed her bewilderment. "I don't see how it much matters," she said, "whether he's forty or fifty." "It doesn't matter in the least," said Newberry. "But you had better make the most of him while you can." "I don't see why," said Muriel. "Because he is popular," Preston explained. "There are several women--women and _girls_--anxious to marry him, and one or other of them is sure to succeed." Muriel winced. She did not relish the thought of losing her new friend, and she wondered why, if he were really sought after in marriage, he had so much time to devote to her and her aunt and uncle, and why he spoke so little of women to her. Stainton, indeed, held his tongue about his intentions for just the length of time that, as he had previously concluded, a man must hold his tongue in such matters. If, in the meantime, Muriel heard from both of the Newberrys more interesting stories of his career in the West, and was impressed thereby, if she got from the same reliable source equally romantic accounts of his wealth and was, as the best of us could not in like circumstances help being, a little impressed by these as well, she was, nevertheless, honestly unprepared for his final declaration. She regarded Stainton as a storybook hero, the more so since his conversation never approached the sentimental, and she delighted in his company for the "good time"--it was thus that she described it--which he was "showing her." In brief, she was at last ready to fall in love with Stainton. Stainton was in love. VI A MAID PERPLEXED So far as Stainton was privileged to know, the end of this first act in their comedy came about in much the manner designed by him. He moved quietly, as he moved in all the details of his life; he had the gift of precision, and when he arrived at what Sarcey called the _scene a faire_, though he was perhaps more in love, as that term is generally understood, than most lovers, he arrived not at all breathless, and found nothing to complain of in what awaited him. Mrs. Newberry had ostentatiously deserted him and Muriel in the white-and-gold Newberry drawing-room splendid with spindle-legged mahogany and appropriately uncomfortable. It was evening, an evening that Stainton had taken care should be unoccupied by any disturbing theatre party or other frivolous forerunner to a declaration.