"It is better when people are accustomed to things a little before they are quite grown up," Dora put in sensibly.

Oh, I hate your blasées girls who know everything," said Mrs. Hamley; and Dora answered, "Yes, so do I," with unruffled serenity.

So Mrs. Hamley never knew anything about Sydney Lowe and his eager and familiar looks, his long and rapid conversation in French, those difficult farewells, and Dora's troubled eyes. There was evidently a secret connected with this young man, and a secret that gave Dora some concern. For she cried that night when she went to bed-just a little; she had too much respect for her eyes to cry much; and once flinging her pretty head impatiently on the pillow, said half aloud: "How I wish I had never seen him! and oh! how I wish I had refused and never done it!"

CHAPTER X.

OVER THE WINE AND WALNUTS.

In almost every country place there is at least one young man who has, sometimes vaguely, sometimes manifestly why, what the world calls a bad character. Perhaps no definite charge can be brought against him, but none the less ill-repute has crept like a mildew over his name. Respectable people are cool to him; careful mothers keep their daughters out of his way; prudent fathers warn their sons against too close intimacy with him; and he is the acknowledged black sheep of the community, tolerated only because of his family and the name he bears.

Mr. Sydney Lowe was of this kind to Milltown. No one knew exactly what he had done that was more disgraceful than the ordinary silly scrapes of youth; and it may be presumed that he had neither robbed a church nor committed a murder. He was the son of Colonel Lowe, of Cragfoot, who had married Lady Anne Graham's daughter, an heiress and a personage; and the Lowes had always been among the first people in this little heaven of exclusiveness. Nevertheless, no one about Milltown cared to be much with him, and those who knew him best liked him least.

Yet he was handsome and clever-too clever by half, they said in the town, where he had been known, man and boy, these five and twenty years, and never any good known of him in the time! And as for his handsomeness, there were those who professed not to see so very much in him when all's said and done, and without any reference to the old proverb which makes handsome is that handsome does. But there were others who said that he was well to look at if bad to do with a fine young man, if a scamp. It was the young men who,

for the most part, held his good looks cheap, and the women who rated them high.

He was one of the light-weight men, about five feet nine in height, supple, active, well proportioned; with good points, such as small hands and feet, broad shoulders, narrow hips, and a waist that would have matched a French officer's. He had a general air of smartness and dressiness about him, wore light gloves, perfect boots, and clothes of noticeable newness; and he always buttoned his coats tightly about him when they were coats with waists and skirts, as they generally were, by which he showed off his points and magnified himself in the eyes of the Milltown womanhood. But with all this he looked

like a gentleman and not like a snob. In features he was sharply cut and darkly coloured. He had a profusion of black hair that shone like silk and curled in multitudinous little rings over his head; a broad, low forehead, olive-tinted; long, arched brows of the pencilled kind above black eyes that never looked straight at men, though, to make amends, they had the habit of staring women out of countenance. His mouth was rather wide, thin in the lips, and curved in the lines; his chin was sharply pointed; his face smoothshaven, excepting for his well-waxed moustaches; and there was a great width between his ears.

All this was very much like other people, and bore nothing on the surface to account for the odd kind of disesteem which hung about his name. Grant that he was idle, as indeed every one must allow, yet he had no need to work. When his father died he would have Cragfoot and his mother's fortune, and come in for everything. Why should he toil through the best years of his life, heaping pound on pound, and wearing away his youth like a nobody instead of enjoying it like a gentleman? As he was the only one to ask this question, he was the only one to answer it; and the answer came, as might be expected, in Mr. Sydney Lowe's using his youth according to his pleasure-sowing many bushels of those disastrous oats which make no bread for a man's future. His father had but little influence over him, and what he had went the wrong way. A tyrant over his wife, he was a slave to his son; and though he sometimes affected to adopt a bullying tone, when his liver was out of order or he had lost an unusually large sum on the turf, Sydney for the most part came off master in any collision that might take place between them.

Colonel Lowe was a proud man with a high temper and a weak will; selfish in his nature if spendthrift in his habits, and unable to rise above his desires. Though it would have been manifestly the proper thing for Sydney to have gone to school, if only to complete the gentleman's part of his education, his father had kept him close to his side ever since he left the nursery, because the boy's liveliness amused him and he wanted a companion. He had only a taciturn and ailing

wife to whom to speak when Sydney was away, and he had long outlived his pleasure in that association. So he educated his son at home, and prevented his making a career for himself, that he might fill the place of filial jester at Cragfoot, that he might boat and hunt and shoot, and play billiards with him when desired; that is, be his plaything indoors and his playfellow abroad.

As time went on ugly rumours, as has been said, began to gather round the young man's name. Young, idle, fond of pleasure and loosely held, were they to be wondered at, even with all the weight of Milltown respectability to keep him straight? Kind friends gave the Colonel hints as to what was said and done; but the Colonel turned a deaf ear to them all. Young men would be young men, he said, and he would rather his son was a natural, high-spirited young fellow who did kick over the traces at times, provided he kicked as a gentleman should, than be one of those mealy-mouthed Joseph Surfaces who are as bad as their brothers, but are not found out because they are more cunning and hypocritical. Whatever then he knew of Sydney's husbandry in the matter of those wild oats with which he was credited he kept to himself; and the lad had never been corrected of bad habits nor educated to nobler things from the time when, as a little fellow, he killed his pet rabbit because it would not learn to beg like a dog, and then tried to hide what he had done by stealing one of Tommy Garth's in its stead.

Of one thing only was Colonel Lowe determined: Sydney should make a good marriage. No one knew so well as himself the necessity for this; for no one knew so well as himself how much of his wife's fortune had gone into the pockets of the bookmakers at Doncaster and Newmarket, and what a mere shell Cragfoot was; and in his own mind he had fixed on old Lady Manley's daughter, Julia Manley, the heiress of Waterfield, with five thousand a year in her own right, and the grand-niece of a duke. To be sure, poor Julia was no beauty. She was a tall, angular, sandy-coloured young woman, with weak eyes and freckles, very good, considered clever, and decidedly silly; but five thousand a year to a young man mainly occupied in sowing wild oats on his own account, and whose father has been a godsend to the bookmakers, will gild even weak eyes and freckles; and as Colonel Lowe used to say, it really does not signify whom you marry! After a couple of years one woman is just like another woman; but the five thousand a year remains.

On the evening of the day when Sydney had met the young ladies of Abbey Holme, and had talked so much French to dear Dora, Colonel Lowe and his son sat by the fire after dinner, sipping their claret with the velvet on and cracking their walnuts as usual.

"Who was that tall young person with the Hamley girl to-day?" asked the Colonel suddenly.

Sydney's dark eyes went down.

"That niece of Mrs. Hamley's," he answered.

"That niece of Mrs. Hamley's?—what niece?"

"I don't know exactly. A brother's child, I believe," said Sydney, with indifference.

"Which brother? There were two, Robert and Reginald," the Colonel said.

"I am sure I don't know. The old fellows were before my time. You must know more about them than I possibly can!" answered Sydney, concentrating all his energies on peeling his nut without a break.

The truth was, both father and son knew perfectly well who Patricia It was simply their mode of fencing.

was.

"That Hamley girl has some good points," said the Colonel, with a kind of contemptuous admission, as if he had been speaking of a dog or a cow; for he too, notoriously gallant to ladies, was by no means respectful to women. Sydney still looked down intent on his task, and this time made no answer. "She wants style, of course," his father went on to say. "It is a good proverb, if a coarse one, silk purse out of a sow's ear; and the Hamley grain is not silk. Blood will out, my boy, whether it is blue or brown; and that Hamley girl, if a pretty thing of her kind, is of a low kind all the same."

that you cannot make a

"She is only distantly connected with Mr. Hamley," said Sydney. He, too, hated the ear which was not silk; but he ignored it in Dora.

"Lucky for her. I confess I should not feel very desirous of being connected with a man who once held my horse for twopence, though he is now the owner of Abbey Holme-worse luck for Milltown! Still, you know, Syd, she is a parvenue, make the best of it you will. I own, not so bad for a parvenue, and might be made something of if well handled. I doubt, though, if she could ever be really refinedrubbed up beyond the outside."

"She is well bred enough," said Sydney, seeing that his father waited as if for an answer.

"Is she? I know so little of her! She is long in getting a husband for a pretty girl. She ought to be looking about her now, I should say-five and twenty if a day!"

"No; only just of age," said Sydney hastily.

The Colonel raised his eyebrows. "You are deep in a lady's confidence, Syd, if you know her age!" he said, with a satirical laugh.

"I happened to know this by chance," answered Sydney with a sulky look.

"And I remember when she came to Milltown ten years ago; and

she was fifteen then, I'll swear. Will you swear to your figures, Syd? Are you sure you have not been hoodwinked by a year or two ?"

The young man laughed uneasily. "Well, really I have not made Miss Drummond's exact age a profound study," he said half insolently. "Nor do I offer one, two, three, or four and twenty as a profession of faith. I said what I thought; but, faith! I may be wrong; and it is of no great consequence either way."

The Colonel looked at him, a smile not wholly of pleasure on his face. "Good," he said; "I don't want you to get too intimate with the Abbey Holme people at any time. They are all very well to be on civil terms with. That old shoeblack understands wine, and his wife gives decent dinners; besides, she is a gentlewoman if a fallen one. But we don't want them as friends, you know, Syd-you and I-we are a flight too high for that."

"It is difficult to keep on very formal terms with people one meets so constantly in such a small society as this," said Sydney, throwing a fly.

His father rose to it, but in the wrong way.

People one meets so constantly?" he repeated with a surprised intonation. "My dear boy, you must be dreaming. Where, in the name of fortune, do we meet the Hamleys so constantly? Why, they are just beginning to be noticed in the place, and are yet only barely tolerated. You cannot call half-a-dozen dinners in the year meeting constantly! And the old shoeblack has not got beyond that-and that's too far!"

"No, certainly; half-a-dozen dinners in the year do not make a great intimacy, as you say," returned Sydney, finishing his wine and lounging up from the table as one profoundly uninterested, not to say wearied of the subject. "Shall you be long, dad?" he asked. "I am off to smoke."

"Go, if you like; I'll follow," the Colonel answered; and Sydney. went, yawning ostentatiously.

When he had closed the door, his father said to himself, as he poured out another glass of claret: "I don't like his manner. I'd lay my life there is something in the wind there. How he looked when I spoke of her! But he fenced cleverly, the young dog-too cleverly. I wish he had been franker, and so had given me a better opening. I'd swear I heard him call her chérie when they passed by the Black Lion, and did not see me in the passage; and his manner said as much as her face. Hamley's cousin for my son? No, not if she brought a million in her skirt! Hard up as I am I'll live and die as I was born; and my son shall not fall below me with my consent!" He sat as if pondering for a few minutes; then he added, still holding solitary counsel: "I will have them here, and then I can judge