Horry laughed the discordant laugh of the deaf, and mumbled a disclaimer of the honour and the implied preference on the part of Catherine, while Harry went on speaking out his thoughts to his second self with yet greater zest. ‘Now, Miss Constable believes in me—fact, I assure you. That plucky, go-ahead little woman is, not to say swindled, by me, for to do myself the justice, I never sought to take her in; but she gives me credit liberally for a thousand manly virtues I don’t possess. She half tempts me to believe in them myself,’ protested Harry, with an excited laugh. ‘It is not like you, old fellow, who have rowed in the same boat with me ever since we two came into this blessed world, and have naturally grown rather blind to my weaknesses and besotted about me altogether. She who never saw me till this season, with all her cleverness, and she is uncommonly clever, which is better by a long chalk than being bookish—not that she is not an educated woman also—does more than take me on trust. She endows me with all the energy and endurance which are hers, not mine. She speaks as if I were going, single-handed, to bring in the waste places of the earth, and found a family. Confound it, Horry, it’s rather nice, and generally improving to be believed in like that by a handsome, good woman, as true as steel, I’ll wager my head, and as proud as Lucifer in her own way, while she is ’cute enough in anything else to see through a millstone,’ finished Harry, complacently stroking his beard, as if he were beginning to suspect that he was really a finer fellow than he himself, or any other person, save the faithful follower by his side, had given him credit for. CHAPTER XIII. OLIVER’S MISSION TO THE WOMEN OF HIS CLASS. Oliver nourished the forlorn hope that he might do something with the girls of his rank in raising their aspirations and refining their habits. They at least belonged to the gentler sex, and ought to be by constitution more tractable and altogether of finer clay. He took to dropping in of an evening at the Polleys, where the male element in the back parlour was but feebly represented by superseded Mr. Polley.