The mere sentiment of his adoration is sufficient for him when devotion alone, without any admixture of vanity, stirs the bright flame within. So Arthur Vavasour turned a deaf ear to the Colonel’s libertine allusions. To him there seemed profanation of his purely fair divinity in thus chaffingly alluding to her delicate loveliness. Neither Colonel Norcott’s age nor his character, to say nothing of the little real intimacy existing between him and Arthur, could justify, he felt, the former in claiming the privileges of a confidant; and this being so, Honor’s devoted admirer, without much preamble or excuse, changed the conversation abruptly to one that happened to be sufficiently interesting to both; for so long as Rough Diamond was first favourite for the Derby, neither Colonel Frederick Norcott nor the heir-apparent of Gillingham could be troubled by any lack of a subject for conversation. CHAPTER III. UNSTABLE AS WATER. Time was speeding away in the fair grounds of Danescourt; the trotting-match had been trotted, and the rat-tailed horse had won the race. Colonel Norcott was triumphant; and the _déjeuner à la fourchette_ had put everyone--men, women, and children--more or less, into still higher spirits than before. As yet, Honor, not at all, as we know, to her surprise, had seen nothing of Arthur Vavasour. The latter had given tolerably truthful reasons for his change of purpose. “Circumstances over which” he believed that “he had no control” were accountable for his appearance at Danescourt that day; but that he had greatly rejoiced in silence over those same adverse circumstances was a corollary with which he had not found it necessary to garnish his statement. And yet the same reasons for his absence, which had before appeared to him such wise and prudent ones, were in as full force _now_ as they had been when Arthur Vavasour decided in his own mind that he would be insane to place himself at the same time within sight and reach both of his _fiancée_ and the woman whom absence had only rendered still more dear to him. “I will not go near her, I will only watch her from a distance; my beautiful Honor! my sweet fairy rose! And it shall be the last time, the very last! In a short time--ah, how very short!--the die will be cast; my fate will be sealed, and I shall be hundreds of miles away, with only the memory of my darling to link me with the past.”