"I fear Mr. Mountjoy has gone out," said Cecil, who imagined that her late admirer must needs have some important business to transact with his host, since only some affair of importance could have brought him back so hurriedly. "But you will find almost every body in the billiard-room, and no doubt some one there will be able to tell you where he is." "You are very good; but I don't want to see Mr. Mountjoy." "You don't?" "Not----" Mr. O'Boyneville was on the verge of saying "Not a ha'porth," but he substituted, "not in the least. In fact, I'm very grateful to the dear old fellow for being out of the way. I have come back to see you, Lady Cecil." There was a little pause. Cecil could find nothing to say. The sense of Mr. O'Boyneville's power subjugated her as she had never before been subjugated. She was like the weakest of little birds who was ever spell-bound by the gaze of a monster serpent. Whether it was animal magnetism, whether it was the intellectual force of a dominant will, she never knew. From first to last, she knew only that Laurence O'Boyneville exercised an influence over her which no other living creature had ever exercised, and that she was powerless to resist his dominion. The Irishman seated himself, and drew his chair close to hers. "Cecil," he said, "why should we trifle with our destiny? In the first hour in which I saw you, something told me that you were to be my wife, and in pursuing you I have only obeyed the voice of my fate. I am not a romantic man, and the current of my life has taken its course between the most arid and blossomless shores that border the great river: but some remnant of my national superstition clings to me still; and from the first moment in which I looked upon you, I felt that you were something more to me than the crowds of pretty women whose faces have floated past me like the faces of a dream. You have thought me insolent, presumptuous! Believe me, Lady Cecil, I have been neither. It has been no confidence in my own merits that has made me so bold. I have been bold only because I believed in my fate. When I came here, I came at peril of hopes that had once been the brightest part of my life. The man whose dinner-table I left unceremoniously to come to this house is a man who can raise me to the bench. I, to whom social life is almost as strange as it would be to an Ojibbeway, have wasted a week in knocking about wooden balls and holding bad hands at long whist. And I have done this because I wanted to be near you, Lady Cecil. I knew from the first that you were intended to be my wife, and that it rested with me alone to win you. Cecil, dear Cecil, are you going to fly in the face of your destiny?"