When she and her brother arrived in the early part of the
evening, Mrs. Pritchard had simply introduced them to me by saying, "I
think you know Tom and Lucretia already." Colonial manners are so
unceremonious. I joined the fatal group once more. "Do you know," I said, addressing
Lucretia with as little tremor in my voice as I could easily manage,
"it's very curious, but I have never heard your surname yet." "Dear me," cried Lucretia, "I quite forgot. Our name is Arundel." "And which is Mr. Arundel?" I continued. "I should like to make his
acquaintance." "Why," answered Lucretia with a puzzled expression of face, "you've met
him already. Here he is!" And she took a neighbouring young man in
unimpeachable evening dress gently by the arm. He turned round. It
required a moment's consideration to recognize in that tall and
gentlemanly young fellow with the plain gold studs and turndown collar
my rough acquaintance of last night, Tom himself! I saw it in a flash. What a fool I had been! I might have known they
were husband and wife. Nothing but a pure piece of infatuated
preconception could ever have made me take them for brother and sister. But I had so fully determined in my own mind to win Lucretia for myself
that the notion of any other fellow having already secured the prize had
never struck me. It was all the fault of that incomprehensible Canadian society, with its
foolish removal of the natural barriers between classes. My mother was
quite right. I should henceforth be a high-and-dry conservative in all
matters matrimonial, return home in the spring with heart completely
healed, and after passing correctly through a London season, marry the
daughter of a general or a Warwickshire squire, with the full consent of
all the high contracting parties, at St. George's, Hanover Square. With
this noble and moral resolution firmly planted in my bosom, I made my
excuses to the rector and his good little wife, and left Richmond for
ever the very next morning, without even seeing Lucretia once again. But, somehow, I have never quite forgotten that journey from Quebec on
Christmas Eve; and though I have passed through several London seasons
since that date, and undergone increasingly active sieges from mammas
and daughters, as my briefs on the Oxford Circuit grow more and more
numerous, I still remain a bachelor, with solitary chambers in St.
James's. I sometimes fancy it might have been otherwise if I could only
once have met a second paragon exactly like Lucretia. _THE THIRD TIME._


I. If Harry Lewin had never come to Stoke Peveril, Edie Meredith would
certainly have married her cousin Evan. For Evan Meredith was the sort of man that any girl of Edie's
temperament might very easily fall in love with. Tall, handsome, with
delicate, clear-cut Celtic face, piercing yet pensive black Welsh eyes,
and the true Cymric gifts of music and poetry, Evan Meredith had long
been his pretty cousin's prime favourite among all the young men of all
Herefordshire. She had danced with him over and over again at every
county ball; she had talked with him incessantly at every lawn-tennis
match and garden-party; she had whispered to him quietly on the sofa in
the far corner while distinguished amateurs were hammering away
conscientiously at the grand piano; and all the world of Herefordshire
took it for granted that young Mr. Meredith and his second cousin were,
in the delightfully vague slang of society, "almost engaged." Suddenly, like a flaming meteor across the quiet evening skies, Harry
Lewin burst in all his dashing splendour upon the peaceful and limited
Herefordshire horizon. He came from that land of golden possibilities,
Australia; but he was Irish by descent, and his father had sent him
young to Eton and Oxford, where he picked up the acquaintance of
everybody worth knowing, and a sufficient knowledge of things in general
to pass with brilliant success in English society. In his vacations,
having no home of his own to go to, he had loitered about half the
capitals and spas of Europe, so that Vichy and Carlsbad, Monte Carlo and
Spezzia, Berlin and St. Petersburg, were almost as familiar to him as
London and Scarborough. Nobody knew exactly what his father had been:
some said a convict, some a gold-miner, some a bush-ranger; but whatever
he was, he was at least exceedingly rich, and money covers a multitude
of sins quite as well and as effectually as charity. When Harry Lewin
came into his splendid property at his father's death, and purchased the
insolvent Lord Tintern's old estate at Stoke Peveril, half the girls and
all the mothers in the whole of Herefordshire rose at once to a fever of
anxiety in their desire to know upon which of the marriageable young
women of the county the wealthy new-comer would finally bestow himself
in holy matrimony. There was only one girl in the Stoke district who never appeared in the
slightest degree flattered or fluttered by Harry Lewin's polite
attentions, and that girl was Edie Meredith. Though she was only the
country doctor's daughter--"hardly in our set at all, you know," the
county people said depreciatingly--she had no desire to be the mistress
of Peveril Court, and she let Harry Lewin see pretty clearly that she
didn't care the least in the world for that distinguished honour. It was at a garden party at Stoke Peveril Rectory that Edie Meredith met
one afternoon her cousin Evan and the rich young Irish-Australian. Harry
Lewin had stood talking to her with his easy jaunty manner, so perfectly
self-possessed, so full of Irish courtesy and Etonian readiness, when
Evan Meredith, watching them half angrily out of his dark Welsh eyes
from the corner by the laburnum tree, walked slowly over to interrupt
their _tête-à-tête_ of set purpose. He chose certainly an awkward
moment: for his earnest serious face and figure showed to ill advantage
just then and there beside the light-hearted cheery young Oxonian's. Edie fancied as he strolled up to her that she had never seen her cousin
Evan look so awkward, so countrified, and so awfully Welsh. (On the
border counties, to look like a Welshman is of course almost criminal.) She wondered she had overlooked till now the fact that his was
distinctly a local and rustic sort of handsomeness. He looked like a
Herefordshire squireen gentleman, while Harry Lewin, with his Irish
chivalry and his Oxford confidence, looked like a cosmopolitan and a man
of society. As Evan came up, glancing blackly at him from under his dark eyebrows,
Harry Lewin moved away carelessly, raising his hat and strolling off as
if quite unconcerned, to make way for the new-comer. Evan nodded to him
a distant nod, and then turned to his cousin Edie. "You've been talking a great deal with that fellow Lewin," he said
sharply, almost angrily, glancing straight at her with his big black
eyes. Edie was annoyed at the apparent assumption of a right to criticise her.