The Sunday-evening visitors at the Fountains were not slow to perceive Florence Crawford's conquest. She was a coquette of the first water, and encouraged her loutish admirer by a persistent avoidance of him. If he hung over her piano, she rattled brilliantly through the shortest of _valses du salon_, or sang the briefest and crispest of her ballads, and had risen from the instrument and flitted away before Mr. Lobyer had made up his mind as to what he should say to her. If he worked his way to the sofa on which she was seated, or the open window by which she was standing, the lively Florence immediately became absorbed in confidential discourse with a feminine visitor, and intensely unconscious of Mr. Lobyer. If Florence Crawford--anxious to marry this man for the sake of his money--had acted on the most profound knowledge of his character, she could scarcely have played her cards better. A dogged obstinacy of purpose was the ruling attribute of Thomas Lobyer's mind; and the coquettish trifling of a schoolgirl aroused that bull-dog characteristic as it had seldom been aroused before. Miss Crawford was eager to know what Cecil Chudleigh thought of her new conquest. She was childish enough to be proud of having made such a conquest. She was weak enough to be flattered by the admiration of a man whose sole title to respect was summed up in the figures in his banking-book. "What do you think of him, Cecil?" she asked her friend. "You mean Mr. Lobyer?" "Yes, of course." "I don't think he is particularly agreeable, Flory. He seems to me to be rather stupid and awkward." "Oh, but he's not stupid. I hear that he has a great deal of common-sense. He's rather good-looking, isn't he, Cecil?" "I suppose he would be called so; but I don't admire his face. Oh, Flory, you surely cannot be interested in my opinion of him?" "Why shouldn't I be interested in your opinion of him?" Flo echoed, peevishly. "He is good-looking, and well dressed, and--by no means stupid. He may be a little clumsy, perhaps; but I have seen heavy cavalry officers quite as clumsy, and in them clumsiness is considered _distinguè_. However, I won't talk to you about him any more, Cecil. You are as romantic as a girl in a novel." Amongst the witnesses of Miss Crawford's triumph was one in whom the spectacle inspired despair. Philip Foley, the landscape-painter, privileged to join the miscellaneous crowd at the Fountains, looked on from the shadowy corner where he sat unnoticed and little known, and ground his strong white teeth as he watched the tactics of the coquette and the hopeless entanglement of the cub. His old friend Sigismund was near him; but Sigismund Smythe the novelist was better known to fame than Philip Foley the unsuccessful landscape-painter; and some people were eager to be introduced to Mr. Smythe, and liked to talk to him for five minutes or so, after which they were apt to retire disappointed.