A dark handsome face bent close to a fair and glowing one, a trembling white hand clasped in a sinewy brown one, two black eyes aflame with the light of love, two blue eyes cast down in a sweet confusion and shaded by long brown lashes.

The scene was the conservatory at the back of Mrs. Mordaunt\'s London house. It was a wilderness--that is to say, a wilderness where art reigned supreme--of shrubs, ferns, mosses, and sweet-smelling tropical flowers. Here and there a shaded lamp glowed with chastened radiance through the greenery; here and there a Chinese lantern hung suspended in mid-air like some huge transparent insect of many colours; here and there a statue gleamed snow-white through the leafage. Some one in the drawing-room was playing a dreamy waltz; in the breaks of the music the low silvery plash of a hidden fountain made music of another kind.

Time and the place conspired. The dark, handsome face bent closer, the lean brown fingers tightened their grasp, two hearts fluttered as they had never fluttered before. Then the words which one was dying to say and the other one dying to hear, broke forth in accents low, eager, and impassioned:

"Clara, darling, you must know that I love you. You must know that I have loved you ever since that day when----"

In smooth, clear accents a voice behind them broke in:

"Clara, love, I have been looking for you everywhere. I want you particularly. Mr. Brabazon, will you kindly open that slide a few inches? I can\'t think what Stevens has been about; the temperature is perfectly unbearable."

Burgo Brabazon was brought back to mundane matters with a shock as though a stream of ice-cold water had been poured down his back. He dropped Miss Leslie\'s trembling fingers and turned in some confusion to obey Mrs. Mordaunt\'s behest. Before doing so however, he contrived to whisper the one word "To-morrow."

By the time he had arranged the slide, Mrs. Mordaunt and her niece had disappeared. He muttered an execration under his breath, for Mr. Brabazon was by no means an exemplary young man.

Ten minutes later he left the house without saying "Good-night" to anybody.

As he made his way through the drawing-room he saw Miss Leslie sitting a little apart from the general company in a recessed window. By her side, and playing with her fan, sat young vacuous-faced Lord Penwhistle--vacuous-faced, but enormously rich. "Ah-ha! chère madame, so that\'s your little game, is it?" muttered Burgo to himself.

A group of three or four men with whom he was slightly acquainted were talking on the stairs. They became suddenly silent when they saw him coming down, and each of them greeted him with a solemn nod as he passed. Burgo felt vaguely uncomfortable, he hardly knew why.

A hansom took him quickly to his club, and there, over a cigarette and a bottle of Apollinaris, he sat down to meditate.

Burgo Brabazon at this time was within a month of his twenty-sixth birthday. He might have been a lineal descendant of Coleridge\'s Ancient Mariner, seeing that, like him, he was "long and lank and brown"; but his was the lankiness of perfect health, of a frame trained to the fineness of a greyhound\'s, which had not an ounce of superfluous flesh about it. He had a long oval face and clear-cut aquiline features; he had dark, steadfast-looking eyes, with a fine penetrative faculty about them which gave you the impression that he was a man who would not be easily imposed upon; his hair and his small moustache were jet black. He was seldom languid, and still more rarely supercilious, while occasionally inclined to be cynical and pessimistic (in which respect he was by no means singular); but those were qualities of which he could disembarrass himself as easily as he could of his overcoat. He dressed fastidiously, but had nothing whatever of the latter-day "masher" about him, he was far too manly for that. Finally, no one could have had a more frank and pleasant smile than Burgo Brabazon, so that it was almost a pity he was not less chary of it.

It is certainly unpleasant when, after much effort and inward perturbation, a man has succeeded in screwing up his courage to ask a certain question which has been trembling on his lips for weeks, to find himself baulked at the very outset--to be, as it were, dragged ignominiously back to earth when another moment would have seen him soaring into the empyrean. It is more than unpleasant--it is confoundedly annoying.

Till this evening Burgo had had no reason to suppose that Mrs. Mordaunt regarded him with unfavourable eyes. His evident liking for her niece had certainly not escaped the observation of that vigilant matron, and if she had not openly encouraged him, she had certainly given him no reason to suppose that any advances he might choose to make would meet with an unfavourable reception at her hands.

Miss Leslie was no heiress; her sweet face was her only fortune. Her father had been a country rector, and had bequeathed her an income which just sufficed to save her from the necessity of joining the great army of governesses. For a young lady so slenderly endowed with the good things of this world Burgo Brabazon might be looked upon as a very fair catch in the matrimonial fishpond--for was he not his uncle\'s heir?

"It\'s all that confounded little Penwhistle," he muttered to himself. "He\'s evidently entêté with Clara, and Mrs. M. will do her best to hook him. But I flatter myself I\'m first favourite there, and if that is so, by Jove! no other man shall rob me of my prize. I\'ll call to-morrow, and again and again, till I can get five minutes alone with her. I never cared for any one as I care for that girl."

He was still deep in thought when some one touched him on the shoulder. It was Tighe, a club friend, to whom he had lost a hundred or so at cards during the course of their acquaintance.

"You have heard the news, of course?" said the latter.

"No; what is it?" asked Burgo languidly, with a half-smothered yawn. Just then he did not care greatly about either Tighe or his news.

For reply Tighe handed him an evening paper, his thumb marking a certain passage. The passage in question ran as under:

"At Nice, on the 12th inst., Sir Everard Clinton, Bart., to Giulia, relict of the late Colonel Innes."

Burgo stared at the paper for some moments as if his mind were unable to take in the announcement.

Then he gave it back to Tighe. "What an ancient idiot!" he said in his usual impassive tone. "He\'ll never see his sixtieth birthday again. But he always was eccentric." And Burgo lighted another cigarette.

But truth to tell, although he took the matter so coolly, he was much perturbed inwardly. The two lines he had just read announced a fact which might have the effect of altering all his prospects in life.

"I wonder whether Mrs. Mordaunt had heard the news when she carried off Clara?" was one of the first questions he asked himself. "And those fellows on the stairs?" Already he began to feel in some indefinable sort of way that he was no longer quite the same Burgo Brabazon in the eyes of the world that he had been a couple of hours previously.

All his life he had been led to believe that he would be his uncle\'s heir. The title, together with such portion of the property as was entailed, would go to his other uncle, Denis Clinton, the baronet\'s younger brother. He, Burgo, was the only son of Sir Everard\'s favourite sister. Both his parents dying when he was a child, his uncle had at once adopted him, and from that time to the present had treated him as if he were his own son. When his education was finished, and Burgo hinted to his uncle that the time had now arrived for deciding upon his future profession in life, Sir Everard had only laughed in his quiet way and put the question aside as a piece of harmless pleasantry; and when Burgo had ventured to broach the subject on two or three subsequent occasions, it had met with no response from the elder man.

Burgo, who had no wish to lead an idle life, would fain have gone into the army, but his uncle was unaccountably prejudiced against a military career, and there had been no hope in that direction.

Thus it fell out that month after month had drifted by without anything being finally arranged, till Burgo had gradually settled down into the groove of a young man about town, with no more serious employment in life than to contrive how his liberal quarterly allowance could be made productive of the greatest amount of enjoyment. And that he did enjoy himself there could be no reasonable doubt. He belonged to two or three pleasant clubs; he knew no end of nice people who were glad to see him, or professed themselves to be so; and when the shooting season began he had the pick and choice of a dozen country houses. In short, Burgo was one of the spoiled darlings of Society, and he was quite aware of the fact, although how much of the favour accorded him was due to his own merits and how much to the reflected radiance of his uncle\'s prospective thousands, was one of those problems of which it would be invidious to attempt the solution.

Of his uncle during these latter years Burgo had seen but little. The English climate disagreed with the baronet\'s health, or so he averred, and three-fourths of his time was spent abroad. He was a confirmed numismatist and an inveterate bric-à-brac hunter. He was said to have one of the finest collections of coins in the three kingdoms, and his house at Oaklands overflowed with curios picked up from every country under the sun. That such a man at the mature age of sixty-three should fall a victim to the shafts of Dan Cupid was one of the last things which any one who was acquainted with Sir Everard Clinton would have predicated of him.