While Miss Somers was discoursing thus with Mrs. Murray under the trees, Arthur Arden had pursued Clare to the village. He had lost the best possible opportunity, he felt. Just as he had been beginning to make an impression! He sped after her between the long lines of trees, swearing softly under his breath at the intruders. “Confound them!” he was saying; and yet in his secret thoughts there was a lurking determination to see that pretty little thing again, although the pretty little thing was nothing to him in comparison with Clare. He skimmed along, devouring the way, planning to himself how he should recover the ground he must have lost by his benevolent errand. “Putting one’s self out of the way for other people is a deuced mistake,” he said to himself. It was not a habitual weakness of his, so that he could identify the moment and recognise the results with undoubting accuracy, and a clear perception of the weakness and folly which had produced them. He must get over this kind of impulse, he thought, and prove himself superior to all such frivolous distractions. A mere pretty face! with probably nothing in it. Arthur Arden remembered Clare, who was not pretty, but beautiful; whose face had a great deal in it, not to speak of her purse; who was to have Old Arden, the cradle of the race. If he could but secure Clare everything would come right with him; and accordingly no pretty face--nothing frivolous or foolish--must be allowed to intercept or block up his way. Clare was going towards the village school when Arthur overtook her. She had been walking very fitfully, sometimes with great haste, sometimes slow and softly, losing herself in thought. He came up to her when she had fallen into one of these lulls of movement, and Arthur was satisfied to see that he was recognised with a start, and that the little shock of thus suddenly perceiving him brought light to her eyes and colour to her face. “You, Mr. Arden!” she said, with a kind of forced steadiness. “I thought you were still occupied about--that--girl. I am so sorry, it seems uncivil, but I don’t really know her name. Was she better? It was good of you to interest yourself so much.” “I did no more than any man must have done,” said Arthur. “Your maid promised to go, and gave me salts, &c. But she was better, I think. The old woman seemed quite used to it. She was lying asleep in the grass--a very pretty picture. But the old woman is an old dragon. She fairly drove me away.” “Indeed!” said Clare feebly, with white lips, feeling that the crisis of her fate might be near. “I only looked at the child--pretty she is, you know, but a little dwarf--when the mother got up and drove me away. I dared not stay a moment longer; and she gave me my orders, to turn my head away if I met them, and never to show my face again. Droll, is it not? One surely should be permitted a little property in one’s own head and face.”