Lady Maulevrier was particularly gracious to her grandson’s friend this evening.  Maulevrier spoke so decisively about a speedy migration northward, seemed so inclined to regret the time wasted since the twelfth of the month, that she thought the danger was past, and she could afford to be civil.  She really liked the young man, had no doubt in her own mind that he was a gentleman in the highest and broadest sense of the word, but not in the sense which made him an eligible husband for either of her granddaughters.

Lesbia was in a pensive mood this evening.  She sat in the verandah, looking dreamily at the lake, and at Fairfield yonder, a broad green slope, silvered with moonlight, and seeming to stretch far away into unfathomable distance.

If one could but take one’s lover by the hand and go wandering over those mystic moonlit slopes into some new unreal world where it would not matter whether a man were rich or poor, high-born or low-born, where there should be no such things as rank and state to be won or lost!  Lesbia felt to-night as if she would like to live out her life in dreamland.  Reality was too hard, too much set round by difficulties and sacrifices.

While Lesbia was losing herself in that dream-world, Lady Maulevrier unbent considerably to John Hammond, and talked to him with more appearance of interest in his actual self, and in his own affairs, than she had manifested hitherto although she had been uniformly courteous.

She asked him his plans for the future—­had he chosen a profession?

He told her that he had not.  He meant to devote himself to literature and politics.

‘Is not that rather vague?’ inquired her ladyship.

‘Everything is vague at first.’

’But literature now—­as an amusement, no doubt, it is delightful—­but as a profession—­does literature ever pay?’

‘There have been such cases.’

’Yes, I suppose so.  Walter Scott, Gibbon, Macaulay, Froude, those made money no doubt.  But there is a suspicion of hopelessness in the idea of a young man starting in life intending to earn his bread by literature.  One remembers Chatterton.  I should have thought that in your case the law or the church would have been better.  In the latter Maulevrier might have been useful to you.  He is patron of three or four livings.’

‘You are too good even to think of such a thing,’ said Hammond; ’but I have set my heart upon a political career.  I must swim or sink in that sea.’

Lady Maulevrier looked at him with a compassionate smile Poor young man!  No doubt he thought himself a genius, and that doors which had remained shut to everybody else would turn on their hinges directly he knocked at them.  She was sincerely sorry for him.  Young, clever, enthusiastic, and doomed to bitterest disappointment.

’You have parents, perhaps, who are ambitious for you—­a mother who thinks her son a heaven-born statesman!’ said her ladyship, kindly.