Avice, of course, knew nothing of this. She only knew that she had come home to find everything miserable, to find an impostor in the brother to whom she had given the whole worship of her youthful heart. And yet, was he an impostor, or was he not rather a very wicked, dark, bad man, like some Byronic hero? She sat in the corner of the settee, darkly brooding, when some one tapped quickly at the front-door; and then she heard it open, and a man’s step in the little porch. Some one entered, saying in a slow, lazy voice: ‘I say, Wellfield, I thought I’d call to wish—— Oh, I beg your pardon!’ followed in a more animated accent. Avice looked at the speaker, and saw a tall, clumsy-looking young man peering at her, rather than looking, from a pair of short-sighted brown eyes. On his homely, square-cut face there was an expression of some embarrassment, not partaken of in the least by Miss Wellfield. She rose, made a gracious bow, mentally casting a reflection of some dismay upon her probably dishevelled appearance, and said, with self-possession: ‘My brother has gone to the Abbey.’ To herself she was thinking, ‘What a great, queer, awkward-looking creature. Surely _he_ can’t belong to one of those “fossilised Roman Catholic families” whom Jerome told me about, as being the only aborigines fit to visit.’ ‘Oh! I saw the light in the window, and supposed he was in. I did not know you had arrived.’ ‘Do you want to see him particularly?’ ‘Oh, another time will do, I suppose. He has just got engaged to my cousin and my greatest friend, and I came to wish him joy.’ A pause. Then Avice said: ‘Miss Bolton is your cousin. Then of course you know her?’ ‘I have known her since she was a baby.’ ‘Then you must be Mr. Leyburn, I am sure. Jerome often used to speak of you in his letters.’ ‘Yes, that is my name,’ said John, unable to take his eyes from the figure before him, with her lovely flushed face, ruffled golden hair, and violet eyes at once bright with recent tears and dark and tired with the fatigue of travelling, and, it must be confessed, with an overpowering drowsiness, to which she had been just on the point of yielding when he arrived. She was like nothing he had ever seen before, and he felt tongue-tied and paralysed in her presence–as if, if he spoke, he would infallibly say something idiotic, even drivelling, and as though, if he moved, his boots would creak, or he would fall over something. Together with these sensations, an intense anxiety neither to speak as a fool, nor to tumble down; which combined currents of emotion rendered his position anything but an agreeable one. Avice herself had begun to think: ‘He is fearfully clumsy, but I am sure he has honest eyes; and if he has known this horrid girl all his life, he can tell me something about her. I shall ask him.’ She therefore said: ‘I was too tired to go out to-night, and—’