Lady Fitz Rewes had determined to prevent the marriage of Lord Reckage with Agnes Carillon. She could not forget the dreadful scene with Sara when that poor girl was endeavouring to reconcile herself to the Duke of Marshire's proposal. Pensée had studied each person concerned in the possible tragedy. She saw that Agnes was by no means serene, that the portrait by Rennes somehow made no progress, that Reckage was feverish and excitable. His bearing toward Sara during the lunch confirmed Pensée's suspicion that the love which had existed between them as boy and girl was still unextinguished on either side. He would have been less than mortal, she thought, if he had not felt, with all the bitterness of a conscious fool, that he had missed his true destiny. Sara possessed the warmth and wealth of heart which were the complements his own bleak nature required. Agnes Carillon, with her accurate, invariable beauty, had a prim disposition, wholesome enough for a man of strange, dark humours like David Rennes, but perilous always in its effect on any frigid or calculating mind. And Reckage was known to be supremely selfish. It seemed to Pensée that Sara had behaved very naturally, very touchingly, through the trying conversation on the subject of rising men and their marriages. Her demeanour had been unsurpassable. But it was not in nature that a woman who understood a man could look on, inactive and indifferent, while he fettered himself with some damaging influence. Perhaps her ladyship felt the situation the more keenly, because, much as she loved Mrs. Parflete, she could not bring herself to think that she was the wife for Robert. She had spent many weeks refusing admittance to this thought, yet prudence was prudence, and, by virtue of its stability, it prevailed. The union, even viewed in the most favourable light, had always seemed imprudent. It was too hurried. Shocking, mortifying as the possibility of its being illegal was, Pensée's conviction that Almighty God ordered all things for the best seemed less a faith and more a matter of pure reason than was usual in the ordinary run of hard cases which made demands upon her piety. "Two diamonds do not easily form cup and socket," was an old saying in her home circle. The more she had seen of Brigit Parflete the more she had been struck with her--struck with her moodiness, struck with her contempt for received opinions, her vigour and independence of will. Was she the wife to further the advance of a man of extraordinary ability, already much handicapped on the world's course by a proud spirit, a reckless, impetuous disdain of creatures generally considered the pink of human excellence? He was passionately in love, and the strength of this sentiment carried, for the time, every thought of his being along with it. But love was not unalterable. The change would surely come. The fever and folly, the exaltation and ardours would fade into a sacred affection--an instinctive tenderness; yet other interests, as vital, and in their season more absorbing, would flock into his life. What then?