Vera smiled, and, with a kiss, the girls parted; and Mrs. Daintree never heard after all the story of her sister's early visit to Tripton, for she returned so soon that she had not yet been missed. The vicar and his family had but just gathered round the breakfast-table, when, after having divested herself of her walking garments, she came in quietly and took her vacant place amongst them unnoticed and unquestioned. CHAPTER XVIII. LADY KYNASTON'S PLANS. Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night. And ere a man hath power to say, "Behold!" The jaws of darkness do devour it up: So quick bright things come to confusion. "Midsummer Night's Dream." Sir John Kynaston sat alone in his old-bachelor rooms in London. They were dark, dingy rooms, such as are to be found in countless numbers among the narrow streets that encompass St. James's Street. They were cheerless and comfortless, and, withal, high-rented, and possessed of no other known advantage than that of their undeniably central situation. They were not rooms that one would suppose any man would care to linger in in broad daylight; and yet Sir John remained in them now a days almost from morning till night. He sat for the most part as he is sitting now--in a shabby, leathern arm-chair, stooping a little forward, and doing nothing. Sometimes he wrote a few necessary letters, sometimes he made a feint of reading the paper; but oftenest he did nothing, only sat still, staring before him with a hopeless misery in his face. For in these days Sir John Kynaston was a very unhappy man. He had received a blow such as strikes at the very root and spring of a man's life--a blow which a younger man often battles through and is none the worse in the end for, but under which a man of his age is apt to be crushed and to succumb. Within a week of his wedding-day Vera Nevill had broken her engagement to him. It had been a nine days' wonder in Meadowshire--the county had rung with the news--everybody had marvelled and speculated, but no one had got any nearer to the truth than that Vera was supposed to have "mistaken her feelings." The women had cried shame upon her for such capriciousness, and had voted her a fool into the bargain for throwing over such a match; and if a male voice, somewhat less timid than the rest, had here and there uplifted itself in her defence and had ventured to hint that she might have had sufficient and praiseworthy motives for her conduct, a chorus of feminine indignation had smothered the kindly suggestion in a whole whirl-wind of abuse and reviling.