Oh, please let me 'obey' you! _May_ I ?" Upon this, as vanity is seldom out of call, Sir Charles swelled like a turkey-cock, and loftily consented to indulge Bella Bruce's strange propensity.

From that hour she was never at home to Mr.Bassett.
He began to suspect; and one day, after he had been kept out with the loud, stolid "Not at home" of practiced mendacity, he watched, and saw Sir Charles admitted.
He divined it all in a moment, and turned to wormwood.

What! was he to be robbed of the lady he loved--and her fifteen thousand pounds--by the very man who had robbed him of his ancestral fields?
He dwelt on the double grievance till it nearly frenzied him.

But he could do nothing: it was his fate.

His only hope was that Sir Charles, the arrant flirt, would desert this beauty after a time, as he had the others.
But one afternoon, in the smoking-room of his club, a gentleman said to him, "So your cousin Charles is engaged to the Yorkshire beauty, Bell Bruce ?" "He is flirting with her, I believe," said Richard.
"No, no," said the other; "they are engaged.