"Lady Naseby owes you a debt of gratitude, Mr. Hardinge, for saving the life of her daughter--and I, too," he added, "owe you an everlasting debt of gratitude." "You, my lord?" said I, turning round in the library, where we happened to be alone. "Yes; for in saving her you saved one in whom I have the deepest interest. So, my dear Mr. Hardinge," he continued, pompously, looking up from the _Times_, "if I can do aught for you at the Horse Guards, command me, my young friend, command me." "Thanks, my lord," said I, curtly; for his tone of patronage, and the cause thereof, were distasteful to me. "You have of course heard the rumour of--of an engagement?" "With Lady Estelle Cressingham?" "Exactly," said he, laughing till he brought on a fit of coughing-- "exactly--ha, ha--ugh, ugh! How the deuce these things ooze out at clubs and in society, I cannot conceive; for even the world of London seems like a village in that way. Ah, nowhere out of our aristocracy could a man find such a wife as Lady Estelle!" "I quite agree with you; but there is a point beyond that." "Indeed! what may that be?" "To get her!" said I, defiantly, enraged by the old man's cool presumption. Was this reference to "a rumour" merely his senile vanity, or had Estelle ignored something that really existed? Caradoc's congratulations, though I carefully kept my own counsel, were as warm in reality as those of Guilfoyle were in pretence. "Wish you every joy," said the latter, in a low tone, as we met in the billiard-room, where he was practising strokes with Sir Madoc. "I don't quite understand." "You hold the winning-cards now, I think," said he, with a cold glare in his eye. "Sir?" "I congratulate you on escaping so many perils with the Lady Estelle, and being thereby a winner." I had just left Pottersleigh, and was not disposed to endure much from Guilfoyle. "The winner of what?" I asked. "The future esteem of the Countess," he sneered. "Perhaps she will present me with a diamond ring on the head of it," said I, turning on my heel, while Sir Madoc laughed at the hit; but whatever he felt, Guilfoyle cloaked it pretty well by laughing, and, as a Parthian shot, quoting, with some point, and with unruffled exterior, a line or two from the fourth book of the _Æneid_, concerning the storm which drew Dido and her hero into the cave.