She replied briefly that she did not know.  Her grandfathers on both sides had been farmers.

The gentleman bowed with the smiling unconcern of one to whom pedigree is a matter of course.

“I have heard often of your father,” he said.  “He is one of the local supports of the party to which I have the honour to belong.  He represents one great section of our retainers, our host another.  I am glad to see such friendship between the two.”  And he smiled elaborately from Alice to Lord Manorwater.

Alice was uncomfortable.  She felt she must be sitting beside some very great man, and she was tortured by vain efforts to remember the monosyllable which had stood for his name.  She did not like his voice, and, great man or not, she resented the obvious patronage.  He spoke with a touch of the drawl which is currently supposed to belong only to the half-educated classes of England.

She turned to the boy who sat on the other side of her.  The young gentleman—­his name was Arthur and, apparently, nothing else—­was only too ready to talk.  He proceeded to explain, compendiously, his doings of the past week, to which the girl listened politely.  Then anxiety got the upper hand, and she asked in a whisper, a propos of nothing in particular, the name of her left-hand neighbour.

“They call him Stocks,” said the boy, delighted at the tone of confidence, and was going on to sketch the character of the gentleman in question when Alice cut him short.

“Will you take me to fish some day?” she asked.

“Any day,” gasped the hilarious Arthur.  “I’m ready, and I’ll tell you what, I know the very burn—­” and he babbled on happily till he saw that Miss Wishart had ceased to listen.  It was the first time a pretty girl had shown herself desirous of his company, and he was intoxicated with the thought.

But Alice felt that she was in some way bound to make the most of Mr. Stocks, and she set herself heroically to the task.  She had never heard of him, but then she was not well versed in the minutiae of things political, and he clearly was a politician.  Doubtless to her father his name was a household word.  So she spoke to him of Glenavelin and its beauties.

He asked her if she had seen Royston Castle, the residence of his friend the Duke of Sanctamund.  When he had stayed there he had been much impressed—­

Then she spoke wildly of anything, of books and pictures and people and politics.  She found him well-informed, clever, and dogmatic.  The culminating point was reached when she embarked on a stray remark concerning certain events then happening in India.

He contradicted her with a lofty politeness.

She quoted a book on Kashmir.

He laughed the authority to scorn.  “Lewis Haystoun?” he asked.  “What can he know about such things?  A wandering dilettante, the worst type of the pseudo-culture of our universities.  He must see all things through the spectacles of his upbringing.”