The blood leapt up into Hurstmanceaux’s face; he was dumb with amazement and regret; he forgot utterly that he was standing bareheaded in a snowy sloppy market-place with a dozen yokels staring and grinning about the gates of the inn yard. He drew a very long breath. “I beg your pardon,” he said gravely and with great humility. “I am shocked----” “You have no need to be so,” she replied, “I quite agreed with your views. But I cannot alter my father, nor you your world.” She stroked the uplifted head of Ossian and turned to go back to the door of the Bell Inn. He strode after her and reached her side. “I am extremely sorry,” he murmured. “I am shocked at my gross indiscretion. I cannot look for your forgiveness. But pray do let me beg of you to take off those pretty velvet boots at once, and let the woman rub your feet with spirits of some sort, failing eau de Cologne. I wish I had thought to take your dressing-bag from your woman.” “Thanks.” She looked at him a moment as she said the word, and he thought there were tears in her large serious eyes. Then she went inside the old posting-house and he saw her no more. “That cad’s daughter, heavens and earth!” he said to himself as he brushed the men aside and hastened across the market-place. He scarcely knew what he said to the frightened station-master and the obsequious mayor, and the bustling town clerk, and all the good people who crowded to welcome a live lord and hear of a railway accident. He was intensely surprised, disproportionately irritated, and sincerely vexed with himself for having spoken so incautiously. He knew that every one of his words must have cut like a knife into the sensitive nerves of this woman whom he had admired and who had looked to him so thoroughbred. He had felt more attracted to her than he had ever felt to any stranger, and to receive this shock of disillusion left him colder than he had been all day in the mists and the snow. Suddenly it flashed across his memory that she must be the heiress whom Mouse had desired him to marry. Suspicion awoke in him. He had not known her but it was very possible she had known him when he had entered the railway-carriage; she had spoken of his likeness to his sister. Her avoidance of any hint as to who she was or whither she was going appeared to him to suggest design. Why had she not disclosed her name until the very last moment? Though a poor man, for his rank, he had been a great deal run after by women on account of his physical beauty, and he was wary and suspicious where women were in question. She had caught him off his guard and he repented it.