His daughter stopped, and a look of blank astonishment spread itself over her face.  She had not been called into that study for years.  She entered, however, as bidden.  Her father, who was seated at his writing-table, which was piled up with account-books, did not greatly differ in appearance from what he was when we last saw him twenty years ago.  His frame had grown more massive, and acquired a slight stoop, but he was still a young, powerful-looking man, and certainly did not appear a day more than his age of forty-two.  The eyes, however, so long as no one was looking at them, had contracted a concentrated stare, as though they were eternally gazing at some object in space, and this appearance was rendered the more marked by an apparently permanent puckering of the skin of the forehead.  The moment, however, that they came under the fire of anybody else’s optics, and, oddly enough, more particularly those of his own daughter, the stare vanished, and they grew shifty and uncertain to a curious degree.

Philip was employed in adding up something when his daughter entered, and motioned to her to sit down.  She did so, and fixed her great grey eyes on him with some curiosity.  The effect was remarkable; her father fidgeted, made a mistake in his calculations, glanced all round the room with his shifty eyes (ah, how changed from those bold black eyes with which Maria Lee fell in love four-and-twenty years ago!) and finally threw down his pen with an exclamation that would have shocked Angela had she understood it.

“How often, Angela, have I asked you not to stare me out of countenance!  It is a most unladylike trick of yours.”

She blushed painfully.

“I beg your pardon; I forgot.  I will look out of the window.”

“Don’t be a fool; look like other people.  But now I want to speak to you.  In the first place, I find that the household expenditure for the last year was three hundred and fifty pounds.  That is more than I can afford; it must not exceed three hundred this year.”

“I will do my best to keep the expenses down, father; but I can assure you that there is no money wasted now.”

Then came a pause, which, after humming and hawing a little, Philip was the first to break.

“Do you know that I saw your cousin George yesterday?  He is back at last at Isleworth.”

“Yes, Pigott told me that he had come.  He has been away a long while.”

“When did you last see him?”

“When I was about thirteen, I believe; before he lost the election, and went away.”

“He has been down here several times since then.  I wonder that you did not see him.”

“I always disliked him, and kept out of his way.”

“Gad, you can’t dislike him more than I do; but I keep good friends with him for all that, and you must do the same.  Now, look here, Angela, will you promise to keep a secret?”

“Yes, father, if you wish it.”