And Ben gave a little gesture with his hand, Mary caught his eye over the glowing darkness of the shaded lamp, and went and wrote her note without a word. Ben’s face had said, or seemed to say, ‘Let them come,--what does it matter?’ And if it did not matter to him, certainly it mattered nothing to any one else. When the note was despatched, Alice sat down at the piano and played to the entire satisfaction of her husband, his mother, and Laurence Westbury. Ben settled down in a corner and took a book, till his aunt Lydia went and sat beside him, when an earnest conversation ensued; and Laurie stood idling by the window, beating back the moths that came in tribes to seek their destruction in the light, and sometimes saying a word to Mary, who, half occupied by the music and more than half by her own thoughts, sat near him within the shadow of the curtains. ‘What sort of people are those that are coming to-morrow, and why don’t you like them?’ said Laurie, under cover of a fortissimo. ‘I never said I did not like them,’ said Mary. ‘No; but I know you don’t. Who are they?’ And then the music fell low into tremulous, dying murmurs, and all was silent in the room except for a shrill ‘s’ now and then of Mrs. Westbury’s half-whispered energetic conversation with Ben. When the strain rose and swelled into passion, the talk at the window was resumed. ‘It is not they,--it is she I don’t like;--one of my old school-fellows, and the most beautiful woman you ever saw.’ ‘Hallo!’ said Laurie, ‘is that the reason why?’ ‘Yes, of course. We should all like to strangle her because she is so pretty,’ said Mary, with a certain rancour in her voice. Laurie sent a great night-moth out with a rush, and then he stooped towards his cousin’s hiding-place. ‘Granted in the general,’ he said, ‘but there is something particular about this.’ What could Mary say? Her heart was quivering with that poignant sense of weakness and inability to resist fate which sometimes overcomes a woman in those secret machinations for somebody else’s good, which are so seldom successful. ‘I have done,’ she said; ‘I will try no more.’ And that was all the answer that was given to Laurie’s curiosity.