Behind her, with his hand on the back of her chair, stands a young fellow of about two or three and twenty; he does not speak to her much, nor join in the merry, empty chatter that is going on around her; but it is easy to see by the way he looks down at her, by the fashion in which he watches her slightest movement, that Vera exercises no ordinary influence over him. He is a tall, slight-figured boy, with very fair yellow hair and delicate features; his blue eyes are frank and pleasant, but his mouth is a trifle weak and vacillating, and the lips are too sensitively cut for strength of character, whilst his chest is too narrow for strength of body. He is carefully dressed, and wears a white, heavy-scented flower in his coat, a flower which, five minutes ago, he had ineffectually attempted to transfer to Miss Nevill's dress; but Vera had only gently pushed back his hand. "My dear boy, pray keep your gardenia; a flower in one's dress is such a nuisance, it is always tumbling out." Denis Wilde, "the boy," as Mrs. Hazeldine called him with a flush on his fair face, had put it back quietly in his button-hole, too well bred to show the pain he felt by flinging it, as he would have liked to do, over the railing, to be trampled under the feet of the horses. The little group kept its place for some time, the two well-dressed and good-looking women sitting down, the two or three idlers who stood in front of them gossiping about nothing at all--last night's ball, to-day's plans, a little bit of scandal about one passer-by, somebody's rumoured engagement, somebody else's reported elopement. Denis Wilde stood behind Vera's chair and listened to it all, the well-known familiar chatter of a knot of London idlers. There was nothing new or interesting or entertaining about it. Only a string of names, some of which were strange to him, but most of which were familiar; and always some little story, ill-natured or harmless as the case might be, about each name that was mentioned. And Vera listened, smiling, assenting, but only half attentive, with her eyes dreamily fixed upon the long procession of riders passing ever ceaselessly to and fro along the ride. Suddenly Denis Wilde felt a sudden movement of the chair beneath his hand. Vera had started violently. "Here comes Sir John Kynaston," the man before her was saying to his companion. "What a time it is since he has shown himself; he looks as if he had had a bad illness." "Some woman jilted him, I've heard," answered the other man: "some girl down in the country. People say, Miss Nevill, he is going to die of that old-fashioned complaint, which you certainly will not believe in, a broken heart! Poor old boy, he looks as if he had been buried, and had come up again for a breath of air!"