"Yes, dear Mr. Anthony," Mildred had said. "You received my note, did you not? And I am delighted you could come here to-day! Of course, it is a dreadful thing to me to think that my little girl will be taken away so soon. But that is what every mother has to go through. Dear me! it seems only yesterday that she came into my room, a little toddling mite, to announce that when she was grown up she was going to marry the groom, because then she could always live among horses." "Oh, that'll be all right," said Anthony. "She can have plenty of them." "How generous of you to say that! You have not--ah--spoken to her yet?" "No. I've been trying to all the afternoon, but I couldn't get an opportunity." "Dear Maud! She is--how shall I say it? But, anyhow, it is so characteristic of her." "She seemed to want to avoid me," said Anthony with a bluntness that rather distressed Mrs. Brereton. "Yes, it would seem like it," said she; "but indeed-- What I wanted to say to you was this: You must be patient with her, and I expect you will need a little perseverance. It is a rare thing, you know, to come and see and conquer, like Julius Cæsar, or whoever it was. Dear Maud perhaps scarcely knows her own mind. I am sure I do not know it. You see, she is young, very young, and I do not think that hers is a nature that expands very early." The young man's rather heavy, commonplace face flushed; for the moment it was lit up, as it were, by a flame from within. "Oh, I'm not going to be impatient," he said. "And as for perseverance, why, there's nothing I would not do, nor any number of years I would not wait, to get her." Mrs. Brereton looked at him critically for a half-moment. "Why, he's in love!" she said to herself. Then aloud, "Dear Mr. Anthony! I am convinced of it," she said. "And bear that in mind when you speak to Maud. Also bear in mind that there is no marriage which either her father or I so much desire. Ah, there is the Duchess of Bolton just come! I must go and speak to her." His interview with Lady Ardingly had been briefer, but, he felt, more to the point. "She will probably refuse you," said that lady. "In that case you had better wait a month and ask her again. You have everything on your side and everybody--except, perhaps, the girl. But eventually she will do what is good for her. Here is a fourth. Let us play Bridge immediately." This particular game of Bridge had rather taken it out of Anthony, for he had been Lady Ardingly's partner, and had had the misfortune to revoke in playing a _sans-à-tout_ hand. Her remarks to him were direct. "You might just as well pick my pocket of twenty pounds," she said to him, "as do that. Do you not see it so? By your gross carelessness you have lost us the rubber, a mistake which one intelligent glance at your hand would have avoided. Come, there are other pursuits, are there not, in which you wish to be engaged? You will, perhaps, follow them with better attention."