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The cousins had the drawing-room all to themselves. Sir Michael was out, my lady in her own apartments, and poor Sir Harry Towers walking up and down upon the gravel walk, darkened with the flickering shadows of the leafless branches in the cold winter sunshine.

“My poor little Alicia,” said Robert, as tenderly as if he had been addressing some spoiled child, “do you suppose that because people don’t wear vinegar tops, or part their hair on the wrong side, or conduct themselves altogether after the manner of well-meaning maniacs, by way of proving the vehemence of their passion—do you suppose because of this, Alicia Audley, that they may not be just as sensible of the merits of a dear little warm-hearted and affectionate girl as ever their neighbors can be? Life is such a very troublesome matter, when all is said and done, that it’s as well even to take its blessings quietly. I don’t make a great howling because I can get good cigars one door from the corner of Chancery Lane, and have a dear, good girl for my cousin; but I am not the less grateful to Providence that it is so.”

Alicia opened her gray eyes to their widest extent, looking her cousin full in the face with a bewildered stare. Robert had picked up the ugliest and leanest of his attendant curs, and was placidly stroking the animal’s ears.

“Is this all you have to say to me, Robert?” asked Miss Audley, meekly.

“Well, yes, I think so,” replied her cousin, after considerable deliberation. “I fancy that what I wanted to say was this—don’t marry the fox-hunting baronet if you like anybody else better; for if you’ll only be patient and take life easily, and try and reform yourself of banging doors, bouncing in and out rooms, talking of the stables, and riding across country, I’ve no doubt the person you prefer will make you a very excellent husband.”

“Thank you, cousin,” said Miss Audley, crimsoning with bright, indignant blushes up to the roots of her waving brown hair; “but as you may not know the person I prefer, I think you had better not take upon yourself to answer for him.”

Robert pulled the dog’s ears thoughtfully for some moments.

“No, to be sure,” he said, after a pause. “Of course, if I don’t know him—I thought I did.”

“Did you?” exclaimed Alicia; and opening the door with a violence that made her cousin shiver, she bounced out of the drawing-room.

“I only said I thought I knew him,” Robert called after her; and, then, as he sunk into an easy-chair, he murmured thoughtfully: “Such a nice girl, too, if she didn’t bounce.”

So poor Sir Harry Towers rode away from Audley Court, looking very crestfallen and dismal.

He had very little pleasure in returning to the stately mansion, hidden among sheltering oaks and venerable beeches. The square, red brick house, gleaming at the end of a long arcade of leafless trees was to be forever desolate, he thought, since Alicia would not come to be its mistress.

A hundred improvements planned and thought of were dismissed from his mind as useless now. The hunter that Jim the trainer was breaking in for a lady; the two pointer pups that were being reared for the next shooting season; the big black retriever that would have carried Alicia’s parasol; the pavilion in the garden, disused since his mother’s death, but which he had meant to have restored for Miss Audley—all these things were now so much vanity and vexation of spirit.

“What’s the good of being rich if one has no one to help spend one’s money?” said the young baronet. “One only grows a selfish beggar, and takes to drinking too much port. It’s a hard thing that a girl can refuse a true heart and such stables as we’ve got at the park. It unsettles a man somehow.”

Indeed, this unlooked for rejection had very much unsettled the few ideas which made up the small sum of the baronet’s mind.

He had been desperately in love with Alicia ever since the last hunting season, when he had met her at the county ball. His passion, cherished through the slow monotony of a summer, had broken out afresh in the merry winter months, and the young man’s mauvaise honte alone had delayed the offer of his hand. But he had never for a moment supposed that he would be refused; he was so used to the adulation of mothers who had daughters to marry, and of even the daughters themselves; he had been so accustomed to feel himself the leading personage in an assembly, although half the wits of the age had been there, and he could only say “Haw, to be sure!” and “By Jove—hum!” he had been so spoiled by the flatteries of bright eyes that looked, or seemed to look, the brighter when he drew near, that without being possessed of one shadow of personal vanity, he had yet come to think that he had only to make an offer to the prettiest girl in Essex to behold himself immediately accepted.