There are two very different ways of dining—­dining with Mr. Bellingham, and dining without him.  But for those who have dined with him, all other prandial arrangements are an empty sham.  At least so Claudius said to Margaret in an aside, when they got to the fruit.  And Margaret, who looked wonderfully beautiful with a single band of gold through her black hair, laughed her assent, and said it was hopeless for the men of this day to enter the lists against the veterans of the ancien regime.  And Claudius was not in the least hurt by the comparison, odious though it would have been to Mr. Barker, had he been there.  Claudius had plenty of vanity, but it did not assume the personal type.  Some people call a certain form of vanity pride.  It is the same thing on a larger scale.  Vanity is to pride what nervousness is to nerve, what morbid conscience is to manly goodness, what the letter of the law is to the spirit.

Before they rose from the table, Mr. Bellingham proposed that they should adjourn to Newport on the following day.  He said it was too early to be in New York and that Newport was still gay; at all events, the weather promised well, and they need not stay more than twenty-four hours unless they pleased.  The proposition was carried unanimously, the Duke making a condition that he should be left in peace and not “entertained in a handsome manner by the elite of our Newport millionaires”—­as the local papers generally have it.  Lady Victoria would not have objected to the operation of “being entertained” by Newport, for it amused her to see people, but of course she would enjoy herself very well without it.  She always enjoyed herself, even when she went for a walk in the rain on a slippery Yorkshire road, all bundled up in waterproofs and hoods and things for her poor people—­she enjoyed it all.

As for Claudius, he knew that if he went to Newport he must of necessity stay with the Barkers, but as he had not yet learned to look at Mr. Barker in the light of a rival, he thought this would be rather convenient than otherwise.  The fact that he would be within easy reach of Margaret was uppermost in his mind.

During the last two days his relations with her had been of the happiest.  There was an understanding between them, which took the place of a great deal of conversation.  Claudius felt that his error in speaking too boldly had been retrieved, if not atoned for, and that henceforward his position was assured.  He was only to be a friend, it was true, but he still felt that from friendship to love was but a step, and that the time would come.  He thought of the mighty wooings of the heroes of his Northern home, and he felt in him their strength and their constancy.  What were other men that he should think of them?  He was her accepted friend of all others.  She had said she hoped to find in him what she had never found before; and were not her words “always, always!” still ringing in his ears?  She had found it then in him, this