Claudia put her handkerchief into her pocket and went to meet her
brother.

Haddington returned alone to the house. Although suffering under a
natural feeling of annoyance at discovering that he was not foremost in
Claudia's heart, as he had led himself to suppose, he was yet keenly
alive to the fact that the interview had its consolatory aspect. In the
first place, there is a fiction that a lady who respects herself does
not fall in love with a man whom she suspects to be in love with
somebody else; and Haddington's mind, though of no mean order in some
ways, was not of a sort to rise above fictions. He comforted his vanity
with the thought that Claudia had, by a conscious effort, checked a
nascent affection for him, which, if allowed unimpeded growth, would
have developed into a passion. Again, that astute young lady had very
accurately conjectured his state of mind, while her pledge of secrecy
disposed of the difficulty in the way of a too rapid transfer of his
attentions. If Claudia did not complain, nay, counseled such action, who
had a right to object? It was true she had eagerly disclaimed any
intention of inciting him to try to break the ties that now bound Miss
Bernard. But, he reflected, the important point was not the view she
took of the morality of such an attempt, on which her authority was
nought, but her opinion of its chances of success, which was obviously
not wholly unfavorable. He did not trouble himself to inquire closely
into any personal motive she may have had. It was enough for him that
she, a person likely to be well informed, had allowed him to see that,
to her thinking, the relations between the engaged pair were of a
character to inspire in the mind of another aspirant hope rather than
despair.

Having reached this conclusion, Haddington recognized that his first