"Yes," cried Oldroyd, "very wrong. I, being a poor surgeon and general practitioner, have been asking your mother's consent to Lucy's becoming my wife." "And Lucy?" said Alleyne softly. "Oh, yes, Moray, dear Moray," she cried, hiding her face in his breast. "I am very glad, Oldroyd," said Alleyne, quietly. "I have thought of it sometimes, and wondered whether it would come to this, and--and I am very very glad." He held out his hand and grasped the young doctor's very warmly, before kissing his sister, after which she escaped to her room, where she stayed for quite an hour before coming down shyly, and with a very happy look in her eyes. Oldroyd was not gone. It was not likely. He had been staying with Alleyne in the observatory--watching his case as he told himself, but not succeeding in his self-deceit, and some kind of natural attraction led him back into the dining-room just as Lucy entered from the other door. It must have been a further charge of natural attraction that led them straight into each other's arms, for the first long embrace and kiss, from which Lucy started back at last, all shame-faced, rosy-red, and with the sensation that she had just been guilty of something very wicked indeed. "Are you happy, Lucy?" said Oldroyd. "No," she said, looking at him earnestly, "and I shall not be till others are happy too." Volume 3, Chapter XIII. AS THROUGH A GLASS. "Love rules the court, the camp, the grove," says the poet; and there he stops, leaving the rest of the places under the pink little god's _regime_ to our imagination. He was busy as ever at Brackley, with people in a humbler walk in life and there was an attraction there for a person who plays no prominent part in this narrative, to wit, Thompson, private dragoon in Her Majesty's service, and valet and confidential man to Captain Rolph. He had long fixed his affections possibly in military temporary fashion upon Mason, Glynne's maid. These affections had glowed during the many visits to Warren and Hall, cooled down during the activities of service--rubbing down his master as he would a horse, and helping him to train--sinking for a year and a half or so after "the upset" at Brackley, and turning up again when the captain came back to The Warren to be hitched on again, as he termed it. For, truth to tell, it was known that Mason had one hundred and fourteen pounds deposited in consols with a certain old lady in Threadneedle Street. Thompson felt glad then, when one day the captain said to him,-- "All packed up, isn't it?" and he replied that the luggage was ready. Whereupon the captain told him that he would not want him for a month. "And, by the way, go down to The Warren before my mother returns, and get my guns, a few books in my room, and the knick-knacks and clothes, and the rest." "Won't you want 'em, sir, next time you're going down?" "Mind your own business, fool, and get the things."