Of the other subject--her jealousy--he had no desire to hear more. She had winced: the woman had been touched to smarting in the girl: enough. She attempted the subject once, but faintly, and his careless parrying threw her out. Clara could have bitten her tongue for that reiterated stupid slip on the name of Whitford; and because she was innocent at heart she persisted in asking herself how she could be guilty of it. "You both know the botanic titles of these wild flowers," she said. "Who?" he inquired. "You and Miss Dale." Sir Willoughby shrugged. He was amused. "No woman on earth will grace a barouche so exquisitely as my Clara." "Where?" said she. "During our annual two months in London. I drive a barouche there, and venture to prophesy that my equipage will create the greatest excitement of any in London. I see old Horace De Craye gazing!" She sighed. She could not drag him to the word, or a hint of it necessary to her subject. But there it was; she saw it. She had nearly let it go, and blushed at being obliged to name it. "Jealousy, do you mean. Willoughby? the people in London would be jealous?--Colonel De Craye? How strange! That is a sentiment I cannot understand." Sir Willoughby gesticulated the "Of course not" of an established assurance to the contrary. "Indeed, Willoughby, I do not." "Certainly not." He was now in her trap. And he was imagining himself to be anatomizing her feminine nature. "Can I give you a proof, Willoughby? I am so utterly incapable of it that--listen to me--were you to come to me to tell me, as you might, how much better suited to you Miss Dale has appeared than I am--and I fear I am not; it should be spoken plainly; unsuited altogether, perhaps--I would, I beseech you to believe--you must believe me--give you . . . give you your freedom instantly; most truly; and engage to speak of you as I should think of you. Willoughby, you would have no one to praise you in public and in private as I should, for you would be to me the most honest, truthful, chivalrous gentleman alive. And in that case I would undertake to declare that she would not admire you more than I; Miss Dale would not; she would not admire you more than I; not even Miss Dale." This, her first direct leap for liberty, set Clara panting, and so much had she to say that the nervous and the intellectual halves of her dashed like cymbals, dazing and stunning her with the appositeness of things to be said, and dividing her in indecision as to the cunningest to move him of the many pressing. The condition of feminine jealousy stood revealed. He had driven her farther than he intended.