She was pleased at the idea of showing off her handsome young husband and her new frock to those advanced young ladies, who had affected a kind of superiority on the ground of what she called “heavy reading,” and what they called advanced views. Janet and Sophia had accepted Lady Cheriton’s invitations with inward protest, and in their apprehension of being patronized had been somewhat inclined to give themselves airs, taking pains to impress upon their cousin that she was as empty-headed as she was beautiful, and that they stood upon an intellectual plane for which she had no scaling ladder. She had put up with such small snubbings in the sweetest way, knowing all the time that as the Honourable Juanita Dalbrook, of Cheriton Chase, and one of the débutantes whose praises had been sung in all the society papers, she inhabited a social plane as far beyond their reach as their intellectual plane might be above hers. “I don’t suppose we shall see Theodore,” said Juanita, as the bays bowled merrily along the level road. The greys were getting a rest after yesterday’s work, and these were Lady Cheriton’s famous barouche horses, to whom the phaeton seemed a toy. “He must have gone to Heidelberg before now,” added Juanita. “He must be fond of Heidelberg to be running off there when it is so jolly at home.” “He was there for a year, you know, before he went to Cambridge, and he is always going back there or to the Hartz for his holidays. I sometimes tell him he is half a German.” She rather hoped that Theodore was in Germany by this time; and yet she had assured herself in her own mind that there could be no pain to him in their meeting. She knew that he had loved her—that in one rash hour, after a year’s absence in America, when he had not known, or had chosen to forget, the state of affairs between her and Godfrey, he had told her of his love, and had asked her to give him hope. It was before her engagement; but she was not the less frank in confessing her attachment to Godfrey. “I can never care for any one else,” she said; “I have loved him all my life.” All her life! Yes, that was Theodore’s irreparable loss. While he, the working man, had been grinding out his days in the treadmill round of a country solicitor’s office, the young patrician had been as free as the butterflies in Juanita’s rose garden; free to woo her all day long, free to share her most trifling pleasures and sympathize with her lightest pains. What chance had the junior partner in Dalbrook & Son against Sir Godfrey Carmichael of Milbrook Priory?