"Like her! Like Lady Ellis! I do not think I could pretend to like her if she were dead. You do not know her." A flush of remembrance darkened the brow of Robert Hunter. Time had been when he knew enough of her. "She is a crafty, wily, utterly selfish woman," pursued Miss Thornycroft, who very much enjoyed a fling at her stepmother. "How ever papa came to be taken in by her--but I don't care to talk of _that_." She seized the poker and began to crack the fire into a blaze. Mr. Hunter took it from her, and he adroitly kept her hand in his. "Had she been a different woman, good and kind, she might have won me over to love her. The Red Court wanted a mistress at that time, as papa thought; and, to confess it, so did I. A little self-willed, perverse girl I was, rebellious to my French governess, perpetually getting into scrapes, running wild indoors and out." Entirely unconscious was Miss Thornycroft how mistaken was one of her assumptions--"papa thought the Red Court wanted a mistress." Mr. Thornycroft had been rather too conscious that it did _not_ want one, looking at it from his point of view; though his daughter did. "Ah, well; let bygones be bygones. You will promise to come, Mr. Hunter?" "Yes," he answered, in teeth of the voice that seemed to haunt him. "If I have not gone away from England on this expedition, I will come." "Thank you," she said, with a soft flush. He turned and looked fully at her. Her hand was in his, for he had not relinquished it. Only about half a minute had he held it; it takes longer to tell these things than to act them. The poker was in his other hand, and he put it down with a clatter, which prevented their hearing the footsteps of Mrs. Macpherson on the soft carpet outside. That discreet matron, glancing through the partially open door, took the view of what she saw with her keen brain, and stood transfixed. "My heart alive, is there anything between _them?_" ran her surprised thoughts. "Well, that would be a go! Robert Hunter ain't no match for her father's child. Hand in hand, be they! and his eyes dropped on her face as if he was a-hungering to eat it. Not in this house, my good gentleman." With a cough and a shuffling, as if the carpet had got entangled with her feet, Mrs. Macpherson made her advent known. When she advanced into the room the position of the parties had changed: he was at one corner of the fire-place, she at the other, silent, demure, innocent-looking both of them as two doves. Not a word said Mrs. Macpherson. Miss Hunter came in, the professor followed, the announcement of dinner followed him. And somehow there arose no further opportunity for as much as a hand-shake between the suspected pair. But on the next day Mrs. Macpherson drove round to Miss Jupp's, and made to that lady a communication.