And what were his feelings with regard to Madeleine? If you wanted to find the key to Ronald Kilsyth's character, it was there that you should have looked for it. Ronald loved Madeleine with all the love which such a heart as his was capable of feeling; but he watched over her with a strictness such as no duenna ever yet dreamed of Years ago, when they were very little children, there occurred an episode which Miss O'Grady--who was then Kilsyth's governess, and now happily married to Herr Ohm, a wine-merchant at Heidelberg--to this day narrates with the greatest delight. It was in Hamilton Gardens, where the Kilsyth children and a number of others were playing at _Les Graces_--a pleasing diversion then popular with youth--and little Lord Claud Barrington, in picking up and restoring her hoop to Madeleine, had taken advantage of the opportunity to kiss her hand. Ronald noticed the gallantry, and at once resented it, asking the youthful libertine how he dared to take such a liberty. "Well, but she liketh it!" said Lord Claud, ingenuously pointing to Madeleine, who was sucking and biting the end of her hoop-stick, by no means ill-pleased. "Very likely," said Ronald; "but these girls know nothing of such matters. _I_ am my sister's guardian, and call upon you to apologise." Lord Claud, humiliated, said he was "wewy thorry;" and the three,--he, Ronald, and Madeleine,--had some bath-pipe and some cough-lozenges as a banquet in honour of the reconciliation. This odd watchfulness, never slumbering, always vigilant, perpetually unjust, and generally _exigeant_, characterised Ronald's relations with his sister up to the time of our story. When she first came out, his mental torture was extraordinary; he, so long banished from ball-rooms, accepted every invitation, and though he never danced, would invariably remain in the dancing-room, ensconced behind a pillar, lounging in a doorway, always in some position whence he could command his sister's movements, and throughout the evening never taking his eyes from her. His friends, or rather his acquaintances, who at first watched his rapt attention without having the smallest idea of its object, used to chaff him upon his devotion, and interrogate him as to whether it was the tall person with the teeth, the stout virgin with the shells in her hair, or the interesting party with the shoulders, who had won his young affection. Ronald stood this chaff well, confident in the fact that hitherto his sister had performed her part in that grand and ludicrous mystery termed "Society," and had escaped heart-whole. He began to realise the truth of the axiom about the constant dropping of water. So long as Madeleine had had sense to comprehend, he had instilled into her the absolute necessity of consulting him before she even permitted herself to have the smallest liking for any man. During the first two months of her first season she had confessed to him twice: once in the case