This candour gave Harrington an uncomfortably chilly feeling, as if a damp cold wind had blown over him, and then he told himself that it would be his privilege to initiate this dear girl in the tranquil delights of a happy home, which, while modest in its pretensions, should yet be smart enough to satisfy her superior tastes and aspirations. “When do you go?” he asked, preparing to take leave. “To-morrow. Your kindness has made everything easy to me.” “Come back as soon as you can, love;” and then there was some lingering foolishness permissible between engaged lovers, and the beautiful Miss Baldwin’s head reposed for two or three minutes upon the articled clerk’s shoulder, while he looked into her eyes and told her that they were stars to light him on to fame and fortune. “I hope they’ll show you a short cut,” she said. He left her cheered by the thought that she was very fond of him; and so she was, but he was not the first, second, third, or fourth young man of whom she had been fond, nor was it a new thing to her to be told that her eyes were guiding stars. CHAPTER XIX. “All the creatures Made for Heaven’s honours, have their ends, and good ones, All but the cozening crocodiles, false women.” February had begun, the frost and snow had disappeared. There were soft breathings of spring in the breezes that blew over the broad grassy downs beyond the Roman encampment, and the sportsmen of the neighbourhood were rejoicing in open weather and lengthening daylight; but Juliet Baldwin was still at Medlow Court, and the heart of Harrington Dalbrook was heavy as he set out in the pleasant morning for some distant meet; and it was heavier as he rode home in the evening, after a day’s sport which had shown him only too distinctly that the black horse was not so young as he had been. He hugged himself with the delusion that those indications of advancing years which were but too obvious towards the close of a trying day across a heavy country, would vanish after a week’s rest, and that the horse would show no signs of staleness at Tattersall’s, where he must inevitably be sold before the end of the month, his owner seeing no other way of meeting the bill that had been given in exchange for a beast whose name should have been, not Mahmud, but White Elephant.