He said: "Lady Charlotte, I feel that I must tell you...I fear that I have been calculating rather more hopefully..." Here the pitfall of sentiment yawned before him on a sudden. "I mean" (he struggled to avoid it, but was at the brink in the next sentence) "--I mean, dear lady, that I had hopes...Besworth pleased you... to offer you this..." "With yourself?" she relieved him. A different manner in a protesting male would have charmed her better. She excused him, knowing what stood in his way. "That I scarcely dared to hope," said Wilfrid, bewildered to see the loose chain he had striven to cast off gather tightly round him. "You do hope it?" "I have." "You have hoped that I..." (she was not insolent by nature, and corrected the form) "--to marry me?" "Yes, Lady Charlotte, I--I had that hope...if I could have offered this place--Besworth. I find that my father will never buy it; I have misunderstood him." He fixed his eyes on her, expecting a cool, or an ironical, rejoinder to end the colloquy;--after which, fair freedom! She answered, "We may do very well without it." Wilfrid was not equal to a start and the trick of rapturous astonishment. He heard the words like the shooting of dungeon-bolts, thinking, "Oh, heaven! if at the first I had only told the woman I do not love her!" But that sentimental lead had ruined him. And, on second thoughts, how could he have spoken thus to the point, when they had never previously dealt in anything save sentimental implications? The folly was in his speaking at all. The game was now in Lady Charlotte's hands.