And then there was that hateful promise which Launce had extracted from her, not to speak of their engagement to any one till he should give her leave to do so. It was only for a few weeks, he told her, probably a month at the most, that he asked her to keep unbroken silence. Private reasons of an imperative nature compelled him to ask this favour at her hands. She had yielded to his importunity, but none the less did she realise how disloyal it was on her part to have a secret—and such a secret—locked up from her aunts. The fact was that Launce Keymer, unknown to his father, or any one at St. Oswyth’s, had for some time past been making love to a pretty nursery governess at Dulminster, the county town, a dozen miles away, to which place he ran over by train on a couple of evenings in each week. Furthermore, he had been infatuated enough—and he now reviled himself in bitter terms for his folly—to write her a number of compromising letters, such as if produced in an action for breach of promise would infallibly land him in heavy damages. He knew that Hetty Blair had more than one correspondent in St. Oswyth’s, and that, if the news of his engagement with Ethel Thursby were once made public, it could scarcely fail to reach her ears. Not that he would have minded that in the least, if Hetty had only burnt or otherwise destroyed those fatal letters. But, as he was well aware, she had done nothing of the kind. He had seen them with his own eyes, tied round with white ribbon, where they lay in the girl’s old-fashioned workbox which stood on the top of the bureau in her mother’s little parlour, and his object was to get them back into his own hands before his engagement to Ethel got noised abroad. That once accomplished, he felt that he could afford to snap his fingers at Miss Hetty Blair. It may seem strange that such a cool, calculating, mercenary fellow as Launce Keymer should so far have run counter to all the principles by which it was his ambition to regulate his life as to permit himself to fall in love with a young person who was compelled to work for her daily bread. But it was just one of those things which occasionally come to pass, as if to upset all one’s preconceived notions of what we poor mortals think ought to happen, and to prove by what contradictory impulses hearts the most calculating and unemotional are sometimes swayed, as by a force they are powerless to resist. Hetty Blair was a pretty brunette, with sparkling black eyes, full ripe lips, and a vivacious, not to say saucy, manner. She was genuinely in love with Keymer, and jealously miserable, although she strove to hide the fact from her lover, because for five evenings out of seven she saw nothing of him, and had no assurance that he was not making love to some one else at St. Oswyth’s—which was precisely what he was doing.