At length, about eight o’clock, just as it was beginning to get dark, she suggested that he should go and sit a while with her father.

“And what are you going to do?” asked Arthur.

“Oh!  I am going to read a little, and then go to bed; I always go to bed about nine;” and she held out her hand to say good-night.  He took it and said,

“Good-night, then; I wish it were to-morrow.”

“Why?”

“Because then I should be saying, ‘Good-morning, Angela,’ instead of ‘Good-night, Angela,’ May I call you Angela?  We seem to know each other so well, you see.”

“Yes, of course,” she laughed back; “everybody I know calls me Angela, so why shouldn’t you?”

“And will you call me Arthur?  Everybody I know calls me Arthur.”

Angela hesitated, and Angela blushed, though why she hesitated and why she blushed was perhaps more than she could have exactly said.

“Y-e-s, I suppose so—­that is, if you like it.  It is a pretty name, Arthur.  Good-night, Arthur,” and she was gone.

His companion gone, Arthur turned and entered the house.  The study-door was open, so he went straight in.  Philip, who was sitting and staring in an abstracted way at the empty fireplace with a light behind him, turned quickly round as he heard the footstep.

“Oh! it’s you, is it, Heigham?  I suppose Angela has gone upstairs; she goes to roost very early.  I hope that she has not bored you, and that old Pigott hasn’t talked your head off.  I told you that we were an odd lot, you know; but, if you find us odder than you bargained for, I should advise you to clear out.”

“Thank you, I have spent a very happy day.”

“Indeed, I am glad to hear it.  You must be easily satisfied, have an Arcadian mind, and that sort of thing.  Take some whisky, and light your pipe.”

Arthur did so, and presently Philip, in that tone of gentlemanly ease which above everything distinguished him from his cousin, led the conversation round to his guest’s prospects and affairs, more especially his money affairs.  Arthur answered him frankly enough, but this money talk had not the same charms for him that it had for his host.  Indeed, a marked repugnance to everything that had to do with money was one of his characteristics; and, wearied out at length with pecuniary details and endless researches into the mysteries of investment, he took advantage of a pause to attempt to change the subject.

“Well,” he said, “I am much obliged to you for your advice, for I am very ignorant myself, and hate anything to do with money.  I go back to first principles, and believe that we should all be better without it.”

“I always thought,” answered Philip, with a semi-contemptuous smile, “that the desire of money, or, amongst savage races, its equivalent, shells or what not, was the first principle of human nature.”

“Perhaps it is—­I really don’t know; but I heartily wish that it could be eliminated off the face of the earth.”