about it at all, indeed—the danger of her position would have been apparent to her. She had been told, with tolerable distinctness, that Lord Robert Elton sought her because she was rich. Therefore she believed it. But to suspect the man who had declared that he ought to have lived three hundred years ago—the brave lion-hunter, the object of assiduous pursuit on the part of so many women—to suspect this paladin of sordidness, never crossed Elizabeth's mind. It is humiliating to have to show that my heroine was a fool: let her youth and her ignorance of the world plead in extenuation of her folly.
June was more than half over, but there was no great heat as yet. The fields were literally "a cloth of gold" with buttercups, through which lovers could still wander at midday, unafeared of the sun's power. The long soft days, indeed, sometimes melted into rain, and the air which was heavy with the scent of roses, always became damp at twilight. The nightingales had ceased singing; but the thrushes and blackbirds still called to each other from the thickets and fruit-trees at sunrise, so that they often woke Elizabeth through her open window. If she was not feeling sleepy, she sometimes arose, and stepped upon the balcony to watch the dewy mists of dawn drunk up in the growing glory of the apricot-coloured sky; and as the evening twilight gathered over the garden, it was here that in those days she often communed with her heart. Outside it, what counsel had she? None.
One day Uncle William, impelled thereto by his wife, began—
"Your aunt says Wybrowe is mightily smitten with you my dear. What are you going to say to him, if
