“Have you begun another?” she asked, at last.

“No, not on paper.”

“But you must.  It must be such a world to you.  I can’t imagine anything so fine as that.  There is so much about life to be said.  To make people see it as it is; yes, and as it ought to be.  Will you?”

“You forget that I am a lawyer.”

“And you prefer to be that, a lawyer, rather than an author?”

“It is not exactly what I prefer, Miss Mavick.”

“Why not?  Does anybody do anything well if his heart is not in it?”

“But circumstances sometimes compel a man.”

“I like better for men to compel circumstances,” the girl exclaimed, with that disposition to look at things in the abstract that Philip so well remembered.

“Perhaps I do not make myself understood.  One must have a career.”

“A career?” And Evelyn looked puzzled for a moment.  “You mean for himself, for his own self?” There is a lawyer who comes to see papa.  I’ve been in the room sometimes, when they don’t mind.  Such talk about schemes, and how to do this and that, and twisting about.  And not a word about anything any of the time.  And one day when he was waiting for papa I talked with him.  You would have been surprised.

I told papa that I could not find anything to interest him.  Papa laughed and said it was my fault, he was one of the sharpest lawyers in the city.  Would you rather be that than to write?”

“Oh, all lawyers are not like that.  And, don’t you know, literature doesn’t pay.”

“Yes, I have heard that.”  And then she thought a minute and with a quizzical look continued:  “That is such a queer word, ‘pay.’  McDonald says that it pays to be good.  Do you think, Mr. Burnett, that law would pay you?”

Evidently the girl had a standard of judging people that was not much in use.

Before they rose from the table, Philip asked, speaking low, “Miss Mavick, won’t you give me a violet from your bunch in memory of this evening?”

Evelyn hesitated an instant, and then, without looking up, disengaged three, and shyly laid them at her left hand.  “I like the number three better.”

Philip covered the flowers with his hand, and said, “I will keep them always.”

“That is a long time,” Evelyn answered, but still without looking up.  But when they rose the color mounted to her cheeks, and Philip thought that the glorious eyes turned upon him were full of trust.

“It is all your doing,” said Carmen, snappishly, when Mavick joined her in the drawing-room.

“What is?”

“You insisted upon having him at the reception.”

“Burnett?  Oh, stuff, he isn’t a fool!”

There was not much said as the three drove home.  Evelyn, flushed with pleasure and absorbed in her own thoughts, saw that something had gone wrong with her mother and kept silent.  Mr. Mavick at length broke the silence with: