“Oh, thank you, Aubrey; but I am very well satisfied with my own,” said Mrs. Bellingham, who did not choose that anything belonging to her should be called antediluvian. “It is more refreshing than anything when one has been a long time in the air. Then that is settled, and I shall not have to speak of it again, I hope. But if I were you--a university man and a club man-- I would show that I was more than a match for Randal Burnside, who never was at anything but a Scotch college, and can’t belong to anything better than one of those places in Princes Street. I would not allow myself to be put out of my way by a provincial. I should be ashamed to give in like that, if I was such a young man as you.” Aubrey shrugged his shoulders, and offered no further defence; and the remaining two days were passed happily enough, Margaret and Randal remaining upon terms of confidential intimacy, without any word on either side to make the situation more plain. _She_ felt that she had committed her secret to his trust, and was partially supported in consequence in the bearing of it--and encouraged to forget it, which she did accordingly with a secret ease and relief beyond all words--while he, too, felt that something had been confided to him, something far more serious than she seemed to be aware of; and yet did not know what it was. Thus, while she was perfectly at her ease with him, Randal was not so happy. He could not ask her a question, could not even let her see that he remembered the half-involuntary confidence, yet felt the most eager desire to know fully what it was which had been confided to him. How could he help her, how could he be of use to her if he did not know? This pleasant fiction of being “of use,” and the eager prayer he had made to her to call him whenever and wherever she wanted him, was it not the natural protest of honest affection against the premature bond which had forestalled itself, which had no right to have come in the way of the real hero? He did not himself know that this was the origin of his anxiety about Margaret, his strong wish “to be of use.” How could he be of use? how interfere between the girl and her lover--he whose only possible standing-ground by Margaret’s side would be that of a lover too?