“I don’t think that Oswald and Lady Baldock are great friends,” said Lady Laura.

“Or he might come and take you and me to the Zoo on Sunday.  That’s the proper sort of thing for a brother and a friend to do.”

“I hate that place in the Regent’s Park,” said Lord Chiltern.

“When were you there last?” demanded Miss Effingham.

“When I came home once from Eton.  But I won’t go again till I can come home from Eton again.”  Then he altered his tone as he continued to speak.  “People would look at me as if I were the wildest beast in the whole collection.”

“Then,” said Violet, “if you won’t go to Lady Baldock’s or to the Zoo, we must confine ourselves to Laura’s drawing-room;—­unless, indeed, you like to take me to the top of the Monument.”

“I’ll take you to the top of the Monument with pleasure.”

“What do you say, Laura?”

“I say that you are a foolish girl,” said Lady Laura, “and that I will have nothing to do with such a scheme.”

“Then there is nothing for it but that you should come here; and as you live in the house, and as I am sure to be here every morning, and as you have no possible occupation for your time, and as we have nothing particular to do with ours,—­I daresay I shan’t see you again before I go to my aunt’s in Berkeley Square.”

“Very likely not,” he said.

“And why not, Oswald?” asked his sister.

He passed his hand over his face before he answered her.  “Because she and I run in different grooves now, and are not such meet playfellows as we used to be once.  Do you remember my taking you away right through Saulsby Wood once on the old pony, and not bringing you back till tea-time, and Miss Blink going and telling my father?”

“Do I remember it?  I think it was the happiest day in my life.  His pockets were crammed full of gingerbread and Everton toffy, and we had three bottles of lemonade slung on to the pony’s saddlebows.  I thought it was a pity that we should ever come back.”

“It was a pity,” said Lord Chiltern.

“But, nevertheless, substantially necessary,” said Lady Laura.

“Failing our power of reproducing the toffy, I suppose it was,” said Violet.

“You were not Miss Effingham then,” said Lord Chiltern.

“No,—­not as yet.  These disagreeable realities of life grow upon one; do they not?  You took off my shoes and dried them for me at a woodman’s cottage.  I am obliged to put up with my maid’s doing those things now.  And Miss Blink the mild is changed for Lady Baldock the martinet.  And if I rode about with you in a wood all day I should be sent to Coventry instead of to bed.  And so you see everything is changed as well as my name.”

“Everything is not changed,” said Lord Chiltern, getting up from his seat.  “I am not changed,—­at least not in this, that as I loved you better than any being in the world,—­better even than Laura there,—­so do I love you now infinitely the best of all.  Do not look so surprised at me.  You knew it before as well as you do now;—­and Laura knows it.  There is no secret to be kept in the matter among us three.”