Lord Newhaven could still see them, could still note her amused face under her wide white hat. He was doing his best for Dick, and Dick was certainly having his chance, and making the most of it according to his lights.

"But, all the same, I don't think he has a chance," said Lord Newhaven to himself. "That woman, in spite of her frank manner and her self-possession, is afraid of men; not of being married for her money, but of man himself. And whatever else he may not be, Dick is a man. It's the best chance she will ever get, so it is probable she won't take it."

Lord Newhaven sauntered back down the narrow black oak staircase to his own room on the ground-floor. He sat down at his writing-table and took out of his pocket a letter which he had evidently read before. He now read it slowly once more.

"Your last letter to me had been opened," wrote his brother from India, "or else it had not been properly closed. As you wrote on business, I wish you would be more careful."

"I will," said Lord Newhaven, and he wrote a short letter in his small, upright hand, closed the envelope, addressed and stamped it, and sauntered out through the low-arched door into the garden.

Dick was sitting alone on the high-carved stone edge of the round pool where the monks used to wash, and where gold-fish now lived cloistered lives. A moment of depression seemed to have overtaken that cheerful personage.

"Come as far as the post-office," said Lord Newhaven.

Dick gathered himself together, and rose slowly to his large feet.

"You millionaires are all the same," he said. "Because you have a house crawling with servants till they stick to the ceiling you have to go to the post-office to buy a penny stamp. It's like keeping a dog and barking yourself."

"I don't fancy I bark much," said Lord Newhaven.

"No, and you don't bite often, but when you do you take out the piece. Do you remember that colored chap at Broken Hill?"

"He deserved it," said Lord Newhaven.

"He richly deserved it. But you took him in, poor devil, all the same. You were so uncommonly mild and limp beforehand, and letting pass things you ought not to have let pass, that, like the low beast he was, he thought he could play you any dog's trick, and that you would never turn on him."

"It's a way worms have."

"Oh, hang worms; it does not matter whether they turn or not. But cobras have no business to imitate them till poor rookies think they have no poison in them, and that they can tickle them with a switch. What a great hulking brute that man was! You ricked him when you threw him! I saw him just before I left Adelaide. He's been lame ever since."

"He'd have done for me if he could."

"Of course he would. His blood was up. He meant to break your back. I saw him break a chap's back once, and it did not take so very long either. I heard it snap. But why did you let him go so far to start with before you pulled him up? That's what I've never been able to understand about you. If you behaved different to start with they would behave different to you. They would know they'd have to."