I can well imagine her coming to reason thus. For the present, unnecessary as she was determined to think it, she yet resolved to do all that was left her to do: she would watch; and while she watched, would take care that the young man was subjected to no annoyance, lest in his wrath his countenance should suggest to another, as to herself, the question of his origin! Thus it came that Richard heard nothing more of his threatened expulsion from Mortgrange. CHAPTER XXXIV. _BARBARA'S DUTY_. The same afternoon appeared Barbara--as none knew when she might not appear--before the front windows of the house, perched upon her huge yet gracious Miss Brown. Arthur was in general upon the outlook for her, but to-day he was not, being more vexed with her than usual for withholding the encouragement he desired, and indeed imagined he deserved--not exactly from vanity, yet no less from an overweening sense of his own worth. It is an odd delusion to which young men are subject, that, because they admire, perhaps even love a woman, they have a claim on her love. Arthur was confident that he loved Barbara as never man had loved, as never woman had desired to be loved, and counted it not merely unjust but cruel of her to show him no kindness that savoured of like attraction. He did not know or suspect that a fortnight of the London season would go far to make him forget her. He was not a bad sort of fellow, had no vice, was neither snob nor cad; his worst fault was pride in himself because of his family--pride in everything he had been born to, and in a good deal he fancied he had been born to, in which his having was small enough. He was not jealous of Barbara's pleasure in Richard's company. The slightest probe of such a feeling toward a man so infinitely beneath him, he would have felt degrading. To think of the two together would have been to insult both Barbara and himself; to think of himself and the bookbinder for one briefest moment of comparison, would have been to insult all the Lestranges that ever lived. Tuke had no _raison d'être_ but work for the library that would one day be Arthur's, and by its excellence add to the honour of Mortgrange! He forgot that Richard had opened his eyes to its merit, and imagined himself the discoverer of its value: did he not pay the man for his work? and is not what a man pays for his own? Does not the purchaser of a patent purchase also the credit of the invention? That the workman in the library knew as much more than he about the insides as about the outsides of the books, gave him no dignity in his eyes: none but a university-man at least must gain honour by knowledge! The fact, however, did make him more friendly; and after he got used to Richard he seldom stiffened his jelly to remind him that their intercourse was by the sufferance of a humane spirit. Barbara's behaviour to him had done nothing to humble him; for humiliation is at best but a poisoned and poisonous humility.