The appearance of the beautiful country girl, with her modest, straightforward manner, and handsome, yet most innocent, eyes, had been like a draught of fresh, sweet air to a man coming out of a chamber foul with asphyxiating gases--not without a certain chilling effect, but refreshing, invigorating, pure--reminding him of the wholesome joys of the life he had left, and contrasting them with the feverish, soul-deadening pleasures of the life he was leading. So that, dropping out of his mind altogether his own shameful conduct on that occasion, he had allowed himself to brood over Deborah’s image as that of the angel who--but not before he was tired of it--should lead him back from his exhausting London life to recruit his energies in quiet Carstow. So that this mandate of Amos Goodhare’s to go and marry Lady Marion fell in the midst of his dreams with disconcerting suddenness. Amos had used his craft so well on Rees’s weak nature that not all Sep’s shrewd observations had been able to shake the young man’s confidence in the judgment of the old. Amos thought for him, and Rees acted upon those thoughts with docility, though he constantly protested with a verbal freedom which Goodhare, while permitting, hated him for. Rees, therefore, did not now stay to ask himself whether Amos had some private motive in this matter of his marriage, but he arrived at the meeting-place in the worst possible temper. Mrs. Walker, Lady Marion’s accommodating friend, was the wife of a city architect, and one of those persons who are ready, by no matter what means, to attach themselves to people of a rank superior to their own. Although exceedingly small, plain, and vulgar she had, by the attractions of a coarse, easy-going good nature and a somewhat startling freedom of speech, secured the equivocal attentions of a young fellow of no brains but of good social position, and it was through him that she had made the acquaintance of Lady Marion Cenarth, who was his own cousin. Mrs. Walker was therefore just the sort of person to be an accommodating friend, and Lady Marion, while inwardly loathing her unrefined manners, was glad to make use of her. On this particular evening Mrs. Walker had had an appointment to go to the theatre, but the fog having prevented her keeping it, she gave Lady Marion her undesirable companionship, and the two sat in the drawing-room with Francis Cenarth, the brainless one before mentioned; the hostess trying to talk a jargon of fashionable slip-slop, to which Lady Marion who, whatever her faults might be, was not frivolous, turned rudely inattentive ears. “He’s not coming, my dear, that is clear, so I should advise you to give up hope, and look pleasant,” whispered Mrs. Walker, as she crossed over to her friend with a cup of tea. But at that moment a cab stopped at the door, and Lady Marion, with a naïve start and a flushing face, betrayed her hopes. A minute later Rees was in the room.