Tatham was silent a moment, his blunt features expressing some bewilderment.  Then he said—­awkwardly: 

“So you don’t really know what you’re going to take up?”

Faversham lit another cigarette.

“Oh, well, I have some friends—­and some ideas.  If I once get a foothold, a beginning—­I daresay I could make money like other people.  Every idiot one meets seems to be doing it.”

“Do you want to go into politics—­or something of that kind?”

“I want to remain my own master, and do the things I want to do—­and not the things I must do,” laughed Faversham.  “That seems to me the dividing line in life—­whether you are under another man’s orders or your own.  And broadly speaking it’s the line between poverty and money.  But you don’t know much about it, old fellow!” He looked round with a laugh.

Tatham screwed up his blue eyes, not finding reply very easy, and not certain that he liked the “old fellow,” though their college familiarity justified it.  He changed the subject, and they fell into some gossip about Oxford acquaintances and recollections, which kept the conversation going.

But at the end of it the two men were each secretly conscious that the other jarred upon him; and in spite of the tacit appeal made by Faversham’s physical weakness and evident depression to Tatham’s boundless good-nature, there had arisen between them at the end an incipient antagonism which a touch might develop.  Faversham appeared to the younger man as querulous, discontented, and rather sordidly ambitious; while the smiling optimism of a youth on whom Fortune had showered every conceivable gift—­money, position, and influence—­without the smallest effort on his own part, rang false or foolish in the ears of his companion.  Tatham, cut off from the county, agricultural, or sporting subjects in which he was most at home, fumbled a good deal in his efforts to adjust himself; while Faversham found it no use to talk of travel, art, or music to one who, in spite of an artistic and literary mother and wonderful possessions, had himself neither literary nor artistic faculty, and in the prevailing manner of the English country gentleman, had always found the pleasures of England so many and superior that there was no need whatever to cross the Channel in pursuit of others.  Both were soon bored; and Tatham would have hurried his departure, but for the hope of Lydia.  With that to fortify him, however, he sat on.

And at last she came.  Mrs. Penfold, it will easily be imagined, entered upon the scene, in a state of bewildered ravishment.

“She had never expected—­she could not have believed—­it was like a fairy-tale—­a real fairy-tale—­wasn’t the house too beautiful—­Mr. Melrose’s taste!—­and such things!” In the wake of this soft, gesticulating whirlwind, followed Lydia, waiting patiently with her bright and humorous look till her mother should give her the