“Understand,” he said, to the woman, sternly, “I am extremely annoyed that you should have let Miss Cranstoun give you the slip this afternoon. Every movement of hers must be watched at this point and reported tome. Either you or the lady’s maid, Ellen, must dog her footsteps everywhere. She must never be again allowed to leave the house alone.” At dinner Lord Carthew informed his host that he was much disturbed by a letter he had just read which had been left for him by his friend. “I dropped into his sitting-room a little before luncheon,” he explained, “and found him lying, fully dressed, asleep on the sofa. I didn’t like to disturb him, and half hoped to see him at lunch. After lunch, I was so pleasantly employed talking to Lady Cranstoun, chiefly about you, Miss Stella, that the afternoon flew by I can’t tell how. Then when I went just now to see my friend, I found that he had flown, leaving only a note in which he asks me to make his excuses to Lady Cranstoun, and to thank her for her kindness, but that as he is quite well, he will not trespass upon it any longer, but will at once return to London, where a doctor of his acquaintance will soon set him up again.” “Mr. Pritchard left a note for me also,” put in Lady Cranstoun, “in which he said much the same thing. It seems so curious that he should have been our guest, and yet that I have never seen him. But I very much hope that he will come to no hurt through making a move so suddenly. He is a very dear friend of yours, is he not?” She turned to Lord Carthew with almost an affectionate touch in her manner. She was slightly flushed this evening, and her pale blue eyes positively shone. It had always been a subject of dread with her lest her beloved Stella should be forced into some marriage totally distasteful to her by her father’s tyranny. But her short interview with Stella that morning, and her long talk with Lord Carthew in the afternoon, had convinced her that here was the ideal husband for her daughter--rich, titled, a connection of her own, and at the same time intellectual, generous, affectionate, and of a singularly high character. His manner to her was perfect. After so many wretched years of slighting and snubbing and terrorizing which she had patiently endured from her husband, the gentle deference and kindly sympathy of Lord Carthew came to her as something altogether new and delightful. If only she herself at Stella’s age had had the good fortune to secure the affection of such a man, she felt that her lot would have been different indeed. Knowing something, too, of the volcanic depths of Stella’s nature, of her determination, her impulsiveness, and her powers of loving and hating in what seemed to poor Lady Cranstoun an exaggerated and incomprehensible degree, her motherly heart was the more rejoiced that a man of originality and evident force of character had seen fit to throw the handkerchief to her.