“Say no more about it, my dear boy; say--no--more,” the kind-hearted old man had said to Arthur when the latter, for the first time after Horace Vavasour’s vicarious explanation, found himself in the library at Fairleigh; “say--no--more;” and, as he spoke, pausing between each word as if to emphasise their meaning, he pressed his wrinkled hand on the young man’s shoulder. “I’m almost sorry I wrote to Milady at all. I suppose,” rather wickedly, “that it made the deuce and all of a kick-up, eh? As for Sophy, I can tell you, I’ve had a pretty time with her! I wish you joy of that young lady, Arthur!” and he laughed heartily, the good old man, at the excellence and originality of his joke. “And so you’re off to the Pembertons? old family friends, you say--All right; just as well to keep those sort of people up, I daresay, though I can’t say I have many of the kind to trouble _me_. No young ladies there though, eh, to worry Sophy? You young London fellows are not always to be trusted,” and again he laughed--a genial hearty laugh that did one good to hear. “No, indeed,” Arthur said, joining, though rather feebly, in the merriment. “All that sort of thing is over for me now. I shouldn’t care to go to Sir Richard’s, only it is an old engagement; and if I don’t go now--” “You won’t be allowed to later, you rogue! Is that what you mean--a previous engagement to Miss Sophy, eh? Well, well, my dear boy, do as you like about it all--or rather, I should say, what Sophy likes. And now be off with you. You’ve given more time already than she’ll think right to the old fellow, and you’ll find her in the conservatory, I fancy, or, if not, in her own flower-garden. By George!” continued the old man, rubbing his forehead with a recollection half comic and half sorrowful of a certain interview with his daughter, whose tears he was never known to be proof against, and who had shown herself a true woman on the occasion of her lover’s temporary eclipse,--“by George! what a way she was in, to be sure! I could hardly fancy it was my little Sophy, the slip of a girl that I was dancing on my knee no longer ago than yesterday, as it seems! And now she’s a woman, and able to take her own part; ay, and _your_ part too, my lad. God bless her! I could have told her then, only I didn’t like to, she was so rampageous, and it doesn’t do to spoil the creatures, that I was more than half sorry I’d called you over the coals. But on the whole, Arthur, it’s just as well as it is; and between ourselves, my boy, although I don’t know that my brother the parson, who is going to splice you and Sophy, wouldn’t call me an old fool for saying it, I’m not sure that I don’t like you the better for what’s past and gone. You might, you know--and I’m told that many a young man would have done such a thing--you might have kept it to yourself that you’d given that long sum for one of John Beacham’s yearlings; for it was a long sum, eight hundred pounds, I think your