Oliver Constable judged so, as he lounged and contorted himself unnoticed in the background, and said it was the way of the world and that young beggar’s luck, of which he was not worthy, which he could not be expected to prize at its proper value. Two people knew better. Catherine Hilliard could not be called one of the two, for she never took the question into consideration. It would have felt too preposterous to her to enquire beforehand, what her feelings might or might not become, for any hero of flesh and blood. Besides, Harry Stanhope was not a man to her, only a boy, a big, merry boy, who formed a momentary study for the thoughtful woman. Mrs. Hilliard, while she was perfectly conscious of the latent antagonism between Catherine and Harry Stanhope, still threw them somewhat ostentatiously together, making Catherine play the accompaniments to his songs, and causing him—which was a little of a trial to Harry’s good temper, to be always on the side of Catherine—an incorrigible bungler, almost as bad as Oliver himself—in the lawn games in which Harry Stanhope and Fan Constable were adepts, a pleasure for game lovers to look upon. Mrs. Hilliard elected Harry to take down Catherine to the improvised suppers which were apt to follow the improvised parties at the Meadows. Mrs. Hilliard could manage these manœuvres with so much ease that it robbed them of half their attractiveness to the manœuvrer, she was wont to complain privately, since Catherine was as blind as a baby to any premeditation in such arrangements, and was only more or less bored by the consequences. All the same, it was her, Louisa Hilliard’s, duty to do what she could as a hostess in the judicious assortment of her guests, and to show her cousinly regard by doing what she could also to prevent Catherine’s missing, by anything save her own folly, the chance of what would never be a great and yet might prove a suitable establishment, in days when girls, far more attractive to the generality of men than Catherine was, could not pick and choose in making a match. If the hostess baffled and plagued any rival pretender—say Fan Constable—to a lion’s share of Harry Stanhope’s universal attentions, so much the better for Mrs. Hilliard’s entertainment, and if it were so much the worse for the rival pretender, whose fault was it save her own?