Before the season was over, Lady Cecil enjoyed the honour of an introduction to Florence Crawford's wealthy admirer. Mr. Thomas Lobyer, of Pevenshall Place, Yorkshire, and of the Lobyer Mills in the cotton country. The dowager and her niece were amongst the Sunday-evening droppers-in at the Fountains within a week of Mr. O'Boyneville's declaration; and it was on that occasion that Cecil beheld her friend's admirer for the first time. The deeply smitten Lobyer had made good use of the Sunday-evening privilege, and every Sabbath found him lounging with a lumbering gait and creaking footsteps in the painter's pretty drawing-rooms, or lurking darkly in the dimmer light of the conservatories, where he held mysterious converse with the cockatoos. It was not that he so especially affected the society of cockatoos; but he was a young man who always seemed restless and uneasy if deprived of the companionship of some animal. He carried a toy-terrier in his pocket when he made morning calls, and caressed the miniature brute stealthily in the frequent pauses of the conversation. He was dull and embarrassed in the presence of an accomplished young lady, but he got on admirably with a ferret or a weasel; and there were people who said he could have made himself at home with a boa-constrictor. The cry of "Rats!" stirred him with as profound a thrill of emotion as that which vibrates through the frame of a thoroughbred Dandy Dinmont, or agitates the bosom of a sharp young bull-terrier. He was fond of his horses, and still more fond of his dogs; but the animals he affected were not the mighty natives of Newfoundland or the noble denizens of Mount St. Bernard. The dogs which Mr. Lobyer purchased at high prices from crack dog-fanciers were generally accomplished ratters, and miniature specimens of the bull-dog tribe, renowned for their tendency to attach themselves to the calves of unoffending legs, and their high-bred objection to being severed from their prey. As the uncertain temper and occasional restlessness of his favourite terriers rendered it rather dangerous to take them to evening parties, Mr. Lobyer was always glad to fall back upon the society of any animal attached to the household in which he visited. He would retire into a dusky corner, and stir up the inhabitants of an aquarium with the point of his gold pencil, in the apparent hope of getting up intimate relations with a jelly-fish. He would beguile the golden inmates of a crystal globe by tearing up minute fragments of one of his visiting-cards, and passing them off for such edible morsels as unwise benevolence offers to gold-fish. His intercourse with the inferior animals was not necessarily of a friendly order. His hands were disfigured by the teeth of his dogs, goaded into desperation by his playful sallies; for it was sometimes his humour to worry the distinguished ratters very much as the distinguished ratters worried the rats.