"If I thought my father cancelled it, Mr. Chattaway should never have had my approbation in pressing it," severely spoke Miss Diana. "Is it true that you think of leaving Trevlyn Farm? Rumour says so." "Quite true. It is time I began life on my own account. I have been asking Mr. Chattaway to let me have the Upland." "The Upland! You!" There was nothing offensive in Miss Diana's exclamation: it was spoken in simple surprise. "Why not? I may be thinking of getting a wife; and the Upland is the only farm in the neighbourhood I would take her to." Miss Diana smiled in answer to his joke, as she thought it. "The house on the Upland Farm is quite a mansion," she returned, keeping up the jest. "Will no lesser one suffice her?" "No. She is a gentlewoman born and bred, and must live as one." "George, you speak as if you were in earnest. Are you really thinking of being married?" "If I can get the Upland Farm. But----" George was startled from the conclusion of his sentence. Over Miss Diana's shoulder, gazing at him with a strangely wild expression, was the face of Octave Chattaway, her lips parted, her face crimson. CHAPTER L DILEMMAS About ten days elapsed, and Rupert Trevlyn, lying in concealment at the lodge, was both better and worse. The prompt remedies applied by Mr. King had effected their object in abating the fever; it had not developed into brain-fever or typhus, and the tendency to delirium was arrested; so far he was better. But these symptoms had been replaced by others that might prove not less dangerous in the end: great prostration, alarming weakness, and what appeared to be a settled cough. The old tendency to consumption was showing itself more plainly than it had ever shown itself before. He had had a cough often enough, which had come and gone again, as coughs come to a great many of us; but the experienced ear of Mr. King detected a difference in this one. "It has a nasty sound in it," the doctor privately remarked to George Ryle. Poor Ann Canham, faint at heart lest this cough should betray his presence, pasted up all the chinks, and kept the door hermetically closed when any one was downstairs. Things usually go by contrary, you know; and it seemed that the lodge had never been so inundated with callers.