"It is very strange," said Mr. Hargrave. "Will you not recal the circumstances to my mind by some fact? Your voice, I will own, sounds familiar to my ears; but----"
"It is of no consequence just now," replied Mr. Winkworth: "by-and-by, when we can have a little chat alone together, I will bring it all up before you in a minute, like the landscape on the rising of the sun. Suffice it for the present that you are sitting beside an old friend."
Still Mr. Hargrave seemed puzzled, and returned to the subject more than once; but the other only laughed, and in a very few minutes they rose to rejoin the ladies. Then, while Colonel Middleton and Charles Marston walked away to the drawing-room, Mr. Hargrave took the other old gentleman by the arm, saying--
"Now you must give me satisfaction. You have attacked the honour of my memory, and I must have an explanation, lest I should think my faculties are failing."
"Well, let us sit down, then," said Mr. Winkworth; and seating themselves at the table, they remained there for a full hour. When they rejoined the party in the drawing-room, the two old men seemed as gay as any of them; and with music, and a game of chess between Mr. Winkworth and Lady Fleetwood, the evening passed lightly to its close. Half-past eleven o'clock came, without Mr. Hargrave's carriage being announced; but three notes were brought to him by the butler, who informed him at the same time that his servant had returned from Detchton-Grieve.
Mr. Hargrave only said, "Very well;" but Lady Fleetwood thought fit to tease herself about the old gentleman's going home so late. In truth, she looked upon the remote part of the country in which she was as little better than a barbarous land, and the journey back to Detchton-Grieve in as formidable a light as a retreat through a pass in presence of an enemy. Nor could she help expressing her sense of Mr. Hargrave's courage in undertaking such a perilous enterprise; but the old gentleman replied--
"I must decline the glory, my dear lady. I am going to sleep here to-night, and perhaps may spend to-morrow here likewise. This is the first time, dear Lady Anne," he continued, turning to his fair hostess, "that I have slept out of my own house for five-and-twenty years; but what would I not do," he continued, gallantly kissing her hand, "for an approving look from those bright eyes?"
"When we are married, you know, you shall always stay at home," said Lady Anne; "and now I have taken care that everything should be made as comfortable for you as possible. I wish I could have got a drawing of your room at Detchton; then you should have found all things precisely in the same state."
"When Cicero wrote his essay upon the 'Consolations of Old Age,'" said Mr. Hargrave, smiling, "he did not, so far as I remember, include that of being made love to by all the beautiful girls in the neighbourhood. But I am afraid he thought that there might be some portion of bitter under the sweet, and that they only ventured to do so from a knowledge that we are very harmless animals, and may be petted without peril. But now, sweet lady, I will seek my room; for, though I flatter myself I am very hale and healthy under seventy winters, yet I must not forget the good old maxim, that 'early to bed and early to rise' is the way to obtain many desirable things."
This was the signal for the general dispersion of the party; but Henry Hayley contrived to obtain an opportunity of saying in a whisper to Maria--