'With yourself for the heroine, or Finella; and that fellow Florian for the hero? Then there must be the requisite villain.'
'Oh, he is ready to hand,' said she daringly, with a flash in her blue eyes.
Shafto's brow grew black as midnight, and what coarse thing he might have said we know not, but policy made him ignore her reply.
'Please not to remain speaking to me,' said she, glancing nervously at the windows of the house; 'your doing so may displease the friends of Finella.'
'It is of her I wish to speak. Listen, Dulcie. I have not the influence over her I had hoped to have before you came among us. If that interloper Hammersley had not absorbed her interest, no doubt, as matters once looked, she might have pleased her relations and bound herself to me, provided she had never found out that I had loved a dear one, far away in Devonshire, and had but a half-concealed fancy for herself.'
Dulcie listened to this special pleading in contemptuous silence.
'I don't want to marry her now, any more than she wants to marry me,' he resumed unblushingly; 'but I may tell you it is rather hard to be ordered to play the lover to a girl who will scarcely throw me a civil word.'
'After the cruel trick you played her, is it to be expected?'
'So—you are in her confidence, then?'
But Dulcie only thought, 'What paradox is this? He dared again to make love to herself, after all that had passed with reference to Florian, and yet to be jealous of Finella's profound disdain of him.'