Wharton raised a protesting hand.

“Oh—­all very well!  Of course it was us you meant!  Well, when he’d driven off, I got up on a cart and had my say.  I asked them whether they didn’t all come out at our big shoots, and whether they didn’t have almost as much fun as we did—­why! the schoolmaster and the postman come to ask to carry cartridges, and everybody turns out, down to the cripples!—­whether they didn’t have rabbits given them all the year round; whether half of them hadn’t brothers and sons employed somehow about the game, well-paid, and well-treated; whether any man-jack of them would be a ha’porth better off if there were no game; whether many of them wouldn’t be worse off; and whether England wouldn’t be a beastly dull place to live in, if people like him”—­he pointed to Wharton—­“had the governing of it!  And I brought ’em all round too.  I got them cheering and laughing.  Oh!  I can tell you old Dodgson’ll have to take me on.  He says he’ll ask me to speak for him at several places.  I’m not half bad, I declare I’m not.”

“I thought they gave you a holiday task at Eton,” observed Wharton, blandly.

The lad coloured hotly, then bethought himself—­radiant:—­

“I left Eton last half, as of course you know quite well.  But if it had only been last Christmas instead of this, wouldn’t I have scored—­by Jove!  They gave us a beastly essay instead of a book. Demagogues!’ I sat up all night, and screwed out a page and a half.  I’d have known something about it now.”

And as he stood beside the tea-table, waiting for Marcella to entrust some tea to him for distribution, he turned and made a profound bow to his candidate cousin.

Everybody joined in the laugh, led by Wharton.  Then there was a general drawing up of chairs, and Marcella applied herself to making tea, helped by Aldous.  Wharton alone remained standing before the fire, observant and apart.

Hallin, whose health at this moment made all exertion, even a drive, something of a burden, sat a little away from the tea-table, resting, and glad to be silent.  Yet all the time he was observing the girl presiding and the man beside her—­his friend, her lover.  The moment had a peculiar, perhaps a melancholy interest for him.  So close had been the bond between himself and Aldous, that the lover’s communication of his engagement had evoked in the friend that sense—­poignant, inevitable—­which in the realm of the affections always waits on something done and finished,—­a leaf turned, a chapter closed.  “That sad word, Joy!” Hallin was alone and ill when Raeburn’s letter reached him, and through the following day and night he was haunted by Landor’s phrase, long familiar and significant to him.  His letter to his friend, and the letter to Miss Boyce for which Raeburn had asked him, had cost him an invalid’s contribution of sleep and ease.  The girl’s answer had seemed to him constrained and young, though touched here and there with a certain fineness and largeness of phrase, which, if it was to be taken as an index of character, no doubt threw light upon the matter so far as Aldous was concerned.