Ozzie accepted the decision.

“Look here.  I think I must be off,” Charlie put in.  “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“I expect you have,” Mr. Prohack concurred.  “By the way, you might meet me at Smathe and Smathe’s at ten fifteen in the morning.”

Charlie nodded and slipped away.

“Infant,” said Mr. Prohack to the defiantly smiling bride who awaited him in the council chamber.  “Has your mother said anything to you about our wedding present?”

“No, dad.”

“No, of course she hasn’t.  And do you know why?  Because she daren’t!  With your infernal independence you’ve frightened the life out of the poor lady; that’s what you’ve done.  Your mother will doubtless have a talk with me to-night.  And to-morrow she will tell you what she has decided to give you.  Please let there be no nonsense.  Whatever the gift is, I shall be obliged if you will accept it—­and use it, without troubling us with any of your theories about the proper conduct of life.  Wisdom and righteousness existed before you, and there’s just a chance that they’ll exist after you.  Do you take me?”

“Quite, father.”

“Good.  You may become a great girl yet.  We are now going home.  Thanks for a very pleasant evening.”

In the car, beautifully alone with Eve, who was in a restful mood, Mr. Prohack said: 

“I shall be very ill in a few hours.  Pate de foi gras is the devil, but caviare is Beelzebub himself.”

Eve merely gazed at him in gentle, hopeless reproach.  He prophesied truly.  He was very ill.  And yet through the succeeding crises he kept smiling, sardonically.

“When I think,” he murmured once with grimness, “that that fellow Bishop had the impudence to ask us to lunch—­and Charlie too!  Charlie too!” Eve, attendant, enquired sadly what he was talking about.

“Nothing, nothing,” said he.  “My mind is wandering.  Let it.”

CHAPTER XXIII

THE YACHT

I

Mr. Prohack was lounging over his breakfast in the original old house in the Square behind Hyde Park.  He came to be there because that same house had been his wedding present to Sissie, who now occupied it with her spouse, and because the noble mansion in Manchester Square was being re-decorated (under compulsion of some clause in the antique lease) and Eve had invited him to leave the affair entirely to her.  In the few months since Charlie’s great crisis, all things conspired together to prove once more to Mr. Prohack that calamities expected never arrive.  Even the British Empire had continued to cohere, and revolution seemed to be further off than ever before.  The greatest menace to his peace of mind, the League of all the Arts, had of course quietly ceased to exist; but it had established Eve as a hostess.  And Eve as a hostess had gradually given up boring herself and her husband by large and stiff parties, and they had gone back to entertaining none but well-established and intimate friends with the maximum of informality as of old,—­to such an extent that occasionally in the vast and gorgeous dining-room of the noble mansion Eve would have the roast planted on the table and would carve it herself, also as of old; Brool did not seem to mind.