"Mrs. Westerton's fancy ball!" echoed Mr. Hazeldine, with a strangely dismal laugh. "What should I know about such frivolities? Besides, I'm too tired tonight. Then, again, something may happen to hinder you from going--one never can tell." "It would have to be something very particular that would keep me away," said Fanny, with a pout. "I'm dying to go--only I can't make up my mind whether to go as a Breton fish-wife, as a Louis-Sèize marquise, or----" At this moment the door opened, and in marched Edward Hazeldine. He had caught his sister's last sentence. "If I were you, Fan, I should go as Ophelia, with straws in your hair," he said. "A touch of madness would become you admirably." "Why don't you keep your rude speeches for your fine lady friends at Seaham Lodge?" asked Fanny, with her nose in the air and a heightened color. But next minute she poured out a cup of tea for her brother and took it to him. Edward Hazeldine was a robust, strongly-built man of thirty, not unlike what his father had been at the same age. His face was instinct with energy and determination. He had his father's thin lips, and his father's cold, steel-grey eyes. He was brusque in manner and decided in all his movements. He was a man who had an excellent opinion of himself, and a dogged belief that whatever he might choose to say or do must be the right thing to say or do. He was not the sort of man you would ask a favor of without thinking twice before doing so. Children rarely made friends with him, and vagrants of every kind had a rooted aversion to him. His ambition--and it was an ambition which in most men of his position would have seemed of that vaulting kind which Shakespeare has told us about, but, somehow, it did not seem so in his case--was one day to win for himself a seat in Parliament; but it was a secret which he kept locked in his own breast. "Have you been up to town to-day?" he asked, as he sat down near his father. "Yes. I had a little business to transact which Brancker could not do for me, so I got the notes changed at the same time." There was something in his father's tone that struck Edward. He bent his eyes on him more attentively than he had hitherto done, and then he saw how careworn and haggard he looked. He did not, however, make any remark about it, knowing how much his father disliked being noticed; besides which, his thoughts were just then running on a very unpleasant matter which more immediately concerned himself. "I had a bit of bad news this afternoon," he presently remarked. "Aye--what was that?" asked Mr. Hazeldine, lifting his eyes from the carpet to his son's face, but betraying no curiosity in the way he put the question. "One of my customers at Monkshill has let me in for a debt of twenty pounds--the scoundrel." "I would not call a man a scoundrel for the sake of a paltry twenty pounds," said Fanny, as she peeped into the teapot.