"Why, you may meet her, Colonel De Craye." "It'll be to offer her a castaway. And one only meets a charming girl to hear that she's engaged! 'Tis not a line of a ballad, Miss Middleton, but out of the heart." "Lucy Darleton . . . You were leading me to talk seriously to you, Colonel De Craye." "Will you one day?--and not think me a perpetual tumbler! You have heard of melancholy clowns. You will find the face not so laughable behind my paint. When I was thirteen years younger I was loved, and my dearest sank to the grave. Since then I have not been quite at home in life; probably because of finding no one so charitable as she. 'Tis easy to win smiles and hands, but not so easy to win a woman whose faith you would trust as your own heart before the enemy. I was poor then. She said. 'The day after my twenty-first birthday'; and that day I went for her, and I wondered they did not refuse me at the door. I was shown upstairs, and I saw her, and saw death. She wished to marry me, to leave me her fortune!" "Then, never marry," said Clara, in an underbreath. She glanced behind. Sir Willoughby was close, walking on turf. "I must be cunning to escape him after breakfast," she thought. He had discarded his foolishness of the previous days, and the thought in him could have replied: "I am a dolt if I let you out of my sight." Vernon appeared, formal as usual of late. Clara begged his excuse for withdrawing Crossjay from his morning swim. He nodded. De Craye called to Willoughby for a book of the trains. "There's a card in the smoking-room; eleven, one, and four are the hours, if you must go," said Willoughby. "You leave the Hall, Colonel De Craye?" "In two or three days, Miss Middleton."