"I should have thought when a fellow was engaged to be married to a girl, other fellows would have sense enough to know that the girl doesn't want their attentions," said the amiable Thomas; and then he stalked to the piano, and stood behind his liege lady, staring moodily at the parting of her hair as she played and sang. Mr. Lobyer was not an enthusiast in the musical art, nor indeed in the pictorial, nor in any art which demands the possession of refined tastes in the man who loves it. Philip held himself aloof from the group around the piano. He heard Flo's clear soprano voice ring out the airiest of ballads, all about Switzerland and "chamois bounding free," and mountain maids, who sing tra-la-la-la from morn till dewy eve. He heard her, and fancied that such silvery notes could only belong to a singer unencumbered with anything in the way of a heart. "She could never sing like that if she had a spark of real feeling," he thought. "How charming she was just now! how sweetly she smiled at me! how graciously she invited me to sit by her side! And yet she has no more consciousness of my suffering than if she were a mermaid. She is going to marry a rich man, and she is so pleased with her good fortune that she is ready to be amiable to all the world. But for pity, or compunction, or womanly tenderness--bah! she does not know what such things mean." The young painter turned his back upon the crowd--the fashionable people who came to the Fountains because they wanted to see what William Crawford was like, and the artists and professional people, who came because they liked him--poor Philip turned his back upon society, and went into a little inner room where there were stands of engravings and photographs, and where flirtations were often carried on pleasantly under cover of art. The little room happened to be empty just now, and Philip threw himself into a chair by the open window, and abandoned himself to melancholy meditation. Mr. Crawford's garden looked very pretty in the starlight. There were trees that had been growing there for centuries--a noble old cedar, which had sheltered the powdered beaux and belles of the Hanoverian dynasty, under which Harley or Bolingbroke may have paced with meditative steps; a tree that had flourished in the days of the court suburb's grandest glory, and which flourished still for the delight of William Crawford the painter, who had given something like a guinea an inch for his old-fashioned garden. Philip had been sitting alone for some time; he had been so long undisturbed that he had forgotten the nature of the place he was in, and the meaning of that gentle buzzing and humming of voices in the adjoining apartment. So profound were the young man's meditations that the sound of footsteps close behind him did not break the spell of his reverie. It was only when a friendly hand was laid upon his shoulder that he looked up and saw his host standing by his side.