"Oh, by-the-bye, Mrs. MacClaverhouse, I met your friend O'Boyneville in Lincoln's Inn to-day, and I asked him if he could run down for a day or two. He seems to be full of business; but when he heard you were down here, he evidently felt inclined to come. Not very flattering to me, you'll say. I told him of our archery-meeting on the twentieth, and he said, 'If it's possible, I'll be down in time for the archery-meeting; but it's about as nearly impossible as any thing human can be.'" Lady Cecil breathed more freely. She dreaded the appearance of her rejected suitor, and the friendly persecution to which his coming would inevitably expose her. But when the two ladies retired to their room that night, the dowager cried triumphantly: "If Mr. O'Boyneville is as much in earnest as I think he is, he'll come to the archery-meeting, Cecil; and I do hope, if he renews his offer, you'll be wise enough to accept it." The archery-meeting of which the judge had spoken was to be a very grand affair, and the young ladies at Nasedale had made their fingers sore and their shoulders weary with the twanging of bows. The meeting was to take place on a noble plateau, at the top of the noblest range of hills in all Surrey; and all the fun of a picnic was to be combined with the excitement of a toxophilite contest. "We might have had our archery-meeting in the park," said the judge, when he explained to his guests the arrangements he had made for their pleasure; "but to my mind half the fun of these things is in the going and returning. The officers of the 14th are to drive over from Burtonslowe to meet us; and I've invited all sorts of people from town. I won't say any thing about the two prizes I selected at Hunt and Roskell's this morning; but I hope my taste will please the ladies who win them." Cecil did not affect the twanging of bows, and was content to remain amongst the young ladies who, after vainly endeavouring to hit the bull's-eye, and losing their arrows in distant brushwood, without having so much as grazed the outermost edge of the target, retired from the contest, and declared that there was nothing so very exciting in archery after all, and that croquet was twenty times better. Amongst these milder spirits Cecil beguiled the fine summer afternoons with that gentle tapping of wooden-balls, and liberal display of high-heeled boots, which is the favourite dissipation of modern damsels; and thus, amid quiet pleasures, with a good deal of riding and driving, and novel-reading and billiard-playing, and much good eating and drinking, time glided by at Nasedale until the nineteenth, and as yet there were no signs of the Queen's Counsel. "If O'Boyneville had meant to be amongst us to-morrow he'd have made his appearance by this time," said the judge in the course of dinner. "He knows we start early to-morrow morning."