What Lady Cranstoun, unfortunately, altogether failed to take into account was that strange magnetism which occasional members of opposite sexes exercise over each other, not always with the happiest results. Beautiful, luckless Clare Carewe had aroused such a passion in the breast of even the cold and calculating Sir Philip twenty years ago, and at the present moment Sir Philip’s daughter was consumed by just such an unreasoning and overwhelming love for Hilary Pritchard, who, after all, had done little more than look into her eyes, speak somewhat disparagingly about her, catch her in his arms in that one mad embrace, and then leave the house, apparently without the wish or the intention to see her again. Hilary had neither rank, nor fortune, nor family; he was not Lord Carthew’s equal in intelligence, nor was he a man of such original and large-minded views. He had sometimes flirted with nice and pretty girls of his acquaintance, but he had seldom devoted much thought to any woman, a good run to hounds being in his opinion far better than the most fascinating courtship, and no woman in the world the equal of his mare, Black Bess. As to marriage, Hilary had no wish for such a binding and fettering arrangement for many years to come. There was the Canadian legacy to be made into a profitable investment first. In time, no doubt, a wife and children would be nice to come home to on winter evenings, but he had scarcely ever regarded even their remote possibilities except as so much more or less ornamental and expensive furniture in his future homestead. He had not meant to fall in love with Stella Cranstoun. Nothing was, in fact, further from his thoughts than to fall in love with anybody. Against his will, her personality affected him, and from the moment when he laid his hand upon her bridle-rein until he parted from her in the corridor, through all the physical pain of his wound, the thought of her beauty haunted his mind, try as he would to cast it out. She was altogether unsuited to him, and marriage with her would be impossible. What was there in common between the granddaughter of a Duke, the child of one of the proudest men in England, and himself, the son of a plain yeoman, of neither family nor fortune? Stella, of course, could not guess that this was her lover’s state of mind, but something of it she gathered from Lord Carthew’s talk when, in answer to Lady Cranstoun’s inquiry as to whether Hilary was a particular friend of his, he said, warmly: “I am extremely attached to him. I attribute his sudden departure to-day to his intense independence of character, which he sometimes carries even to an aggressive extent. He was very angry over what he chose to consider as the false position in which he was placed by my whim in changing names with him, for which trick I have not yet sufficiently apologized to you or to Miss Cranstoun.” He turned eagerly to Stella as he spoke, but she rewarded him only by a frigid bend of the head.