"What was her actual message to me?" "There was none, she is going away if she can; she trusted me to see you, her wish was to prevent a meeting between you and Sir Francis." "I saw him last night." "Last night? On this matter?" The Earl looked at his cousin now; inscrutable still, however, the veiled expression of his beautiful eyes. "Yes, he came to the St. James's to throw up his appointment because of this; he is a foolish romantical fellow; perhaps he wished to force a duel on me, I cannot tell." Miss Chressham was silent. It seemed curious that Rose could speak in this fashion; folly, romance, and fire, were they all dead in his breast? He spoke of Sir Francis as an old man might of a boy, and he not much more than five-and-twenty himself. "And for Miss Boyle's sake you refrained?" she asked. "Why should I meet him?" he answered evasively. "I suppose she will marry him now; I think he is a good fellow." "Oh, Rose!" cried Susannah impatiently. "Why do you seek to put me off? She told me what you had written to her--you know, as I know, that she will never marry him." My lord was silent, and not all her sharp glances could discern from his immobile face what was passing in his mind. "Sir Francis is impetuous," she continued; "but his situation is maddening, and he thinks, hopes, the thing is a lie." The Earl smiled, half turning his face to her. "Sir Francis stands excused, by me at least, though he flung back my favour at me like a fool, and so has given me some trouble for nothing." Miss Chressham twisted her fine fingers together. "We have not come to discuss Sir Francis. I think of Selina, and of the fact that she asked me to help her." "How help her?" asked my lord slowly. "Have you not said Sir Francis believes the paragraph a lie?" "There are those believe it true." Rose Lyndwood shrugged his shoulders. "There is not a lady of fashion in town, nor any who has had the name of a belle, who has not been flicked at in the _Gazette_." Susannah answered impatiently. "Oh, Rose, because ye are jaded with pamphleteers, and it is nothing to you what any say of you--cannot you understand her feelings?" My lord pressed his handkerchief to his lips. "I think you both, like women, make too much of it," he answered lightly, with a steady glance under drooping lids. Miss Chressham felt herself colour angrily. "Then I think you must take a woman's point of view of this matter, too, Rose; remember that she can blame you that the affair ever became public." "In what way?" he asked. Susannah, goaded into direct speech by what seemed to her his wilful slowness, answered with the blood still hotter in her cheeks. "In this way: firstly, that you wrote to her at all; secondly, that you lost her letter."