She rang the bell, and swept from the room stately and uplifted. May looked after her, fidgeting a little.

"Dear me! I suppose she is offended now at that word 'selfish.' I never did get on very well with Aileen Jocyln, and I'm afraid I never shall. I shouldn't wonder if she were jealous."

Miss Everard laughed a little silvery laugh all to herself, and slapped her kid riding-boot with her pretty toy whip.

"I hope I didn't interrupt a tender declaration that night in the conservatory; but it looked like it. If I did I am sure Rupert has had fifty chances since, and I know he hasn't availed himself of them, or Aileen would never wear that dissatisfied face. I know she's in love with him, though, to be sure, she would see me impaled with the greatest pleasure if she only thought I suspected it; but I'm not so certain about him. He's a great deal too indolent, in the first place, to get up a grand passion for anybody; and I think he's inclined to look graciously on me--poor little me--in the second. You may spare yourself the trouble, my dear Sir Rupert, for a gentleman whose chief aim in existence is to smoke Turkish pipes, and lie on the grass, and write and read poetry, is not at all the sort of man I mean to bless for life.

"Tell me not of your soft sighing lovers, Such things may be had by the score; I'd rather be bride to a rover, And polish the rifle he bore."

Sang May Everard, in a gay little voice as Miss Jocyln, in a flowing riding habit, entered the room.

The two girls descended to the court-yard, mounted, and rode off. Both rode well and both looked their best on horseback, and made a wonderfully pretty picture as they galloped through St. Gosport in dashing style, bringing the admiring population in a rush to doors and windows. Perhaps Sir Rupert Thetford thought so, too, as he stood at the great front entrance to receive them with a kindling light in his artist's eyes.

"May said she would fetch you, and May always keeps her word," he said, as he walked slowly up the sweeping staircase; "besides, Aileen, I am to have the first sitting for the 'Rosamond and Eleanor' to-day, am I not?

May calls me an idle dreamer, a useless drone in the busy human hive; so, to vindicate my character, and cleave a niche in the temple of fame, I am going to immortalize myself over this painting."

"You'll never finish it," said May; "it will be like all the rest.

You'll begin on a gigantic scale and with super-human efforts, and you'll cool down and get sick of it before it is half finished; and it will go to swell the pile of daubed canvas in your studio now. Don't tell me! I know you."

"And have the poorest possible opinion of me, Miss Everard?"

"Yes, I have! I have no patience when I think of what you might do, what you might become, and see what you are. If you were not Sir Rupert Thetford, with a princely income, you might be a clever man. As it is--"

a shrug, and a lift of the eyebrows.

"As it is!" cried the young baronet, trying to laugh and reddening violently, "I will still be a clever man--a modern Murillo. Are you not a little severe, Miss Everard; Aileen, I believe this is your first visit to my studio?"

"Yes," said Miss Jocyln, coldly and briefly. She did not like the conversation, and May Everard's familiar home-truths stung her. To her he was everything mortal man should be. She was proud, but she was not ambitious; what right had this penniless little free-speaker to come between them and talk like this?

May was flitting about like the fairy she was, her head a little on one side, like a critical canary, her flowing skirt held up, inspecting the pictures.

"'Jeannie D'Arc before her Judges,' half finished, as usual, and never to be completed; and weak--very, if it ever is completed. 'Battle of Bosworth Field,' in flaming colors, all confusion and smoke, and red ochre and rubbish, you did well not to trouble yourself any more with that. 'Swiss Peasant,' ah! that is pretty. 'Storm at Sea,' just tolerable. 'Trial of Marie Antoinette.' My dear Rupert, why will you persist in these figure paintings when you know your forte is landscape?

'An Evening in the Eternal City.' Now that is what I call an exquisite little thing? Look at the moon, Aileen, rising over these hill tops; and see those trees--you can almost feel the wind blow! And that prostrate figure--why, that looks like yourself, Rupert!"

"It is myself."

"And the other stooping--who is he?"

"The painter of that picture, Miss Everard; yes, the only thing in my poor studio you see fit to eulogize, is not mine. It was done by an artist friend--an unknown Englishman, who saved my life in Rome three years ago. Come in, mother mine, and defend your son from the two-edged sword of May Everard's tongue."

For Lady Thetford, pale and languid, appeared on the threshold, wrapped in a shawl.

"It's all for his good, mamma. Come here and look at this 'Evening in the Eternal City.' Rupert has nothing like it in all his collection, though there are the beginning of many better things. He saved your life? How was it?"

"Oh! a little affair with brigands; nothing very thrilling, but I should have been killed or captured all the same if this Legard had not come to the rescue. May is right about the picture; he painted well, had come to Rome to perfect himself in his art. Very fine fellow, Legard--a thorough Bohemian."

"Legard!"

It was Lady Thetford who had spoken sharply and suddenly. She had put up her glass to look at the Italian picture, but dropped it, and faced abruptly round.

"Yes, Legard. Guy Legard, a young Englishman, about my own age.

By-the-by, if you saw him, you would be surprised by his singular resemblance to some of those dead and gone Thetfords hanging over there in the picture-gallery--fair hair, blue eyes, and the same peculiar cast of features to a shade. I was taken rather aback, I confess, when I saw it first. My dear mother--"

It was not a cry Lady Thetford had uttered--it was a kind of wordless sob. He soon caught her in his arms, and held her there, her face the color of death.

"Get a glass of water, May--she is subject to these attacks. Quick!"

Lady Thetford drank the water, and sunk back in the chair Aileen wheeled up, her face looking awfully corpse-like in contrast with her dark garments and dead black hair.

"You should not have left your room," said Sir Rupert, "after your attack this morning. Perhaps you had better return and lie down. You look perfectly ghastly."

"No," his mother sat up as she spoke and pushed away the glass, "there is no necessity for lying down. Don't wear that scared face, May--it was nothing, I assure you. Go on with what you were saying, Rupert."

"What I was saying? what was it?"

"About this young artist's resemblance to the Thetfords."

"Oh! well, there's no more to say, that is all. He saved my life, he painted that picture, and we were Damon and Pythias over again during my stay in Rome. I always do fraternize with these sort of fellows, you know. I left him in Rome, and he promised, if he ever returned to England, which he wasn't so sure of, he would run down to Devonshire to see me and my painted ancestors, whom he resembles so strongly. That is all; and now young ladies if you will take your places, we will commence the Rosamond and Eleanor. Mother, sit here by this window, if you want to play propriety, and don't talk."

But Lady Thetford chose to go to her own room; and her son gave her his arm thither, and left her lying back amongst her cushions in front of the fire. It was always chilly in those great and somewhat gloomy rooms, and her ladyship was always cold of late. She lay there looking with gloomy eyes into the ruddy blaze, and holding her hands over her painfully beating heart.

"It is destiny, I suppose," she thought, bitterly; "let me banish him to the farthest end of the earth; let me keep him in poverty and obscurity all his life, and when the day comes that it is written, Guy Legard will be here. Sooner or later, the vow I have broken to Sir Noel Thetford must be kept; sooner or later, Sir Noel's heir will have his own."

CHAPTER X.

ASKING IN MARRIAGE.

The fire burned in Lady Thetford's room, and among piles of silken pillows my lady, languid and pale, lay, looking into the leaping flame.

It was a warm summer morning, the sun blazed like a wheel of fire in a sky without a cloud, but Lady Thetford was always chilly of late. She drew the crimson shawl she wore closer around her, and glanced impatiently now and then at the pretty toy clock on the decorated chimney-piece. The house was very still; its one disturbing element, Miss Everard, was absent with Sir Rupert for a morning canter over the sunny Devon hills.

The toy clock struck up a gay little waltz preparatory to striking eleven, and my lady turned with a restless, impatient sigh among her pillows.

"How long they stay, and these solitary rides are so dangerous! Oh! what will become of me if it is too late, after all! What shall I do if he says no?"

There was a quick man's step without--a moment, and the door opened, and Sir Rupert, "booted and spurred" from his ride, was bending over his mother.

"Louise says you sent for me after I left. What is it, mother--you are not worse?"

He knelt beside her. Lady Thetford put back the fair, brown hair with tender touch, and gazed in the handsome face, so like her own, with eyes full of unspeakable love.

"My boy! my boy!" she murmured, "my darling Rupert! Oh! it is hard, it is bitter to have to leave you."

"Mother!" with a quick look of alarm, "what is it? Are you worse?"

"No worse, Rupert; but no better. My boy, I shall never be better again in this world."