Tea having supplied the place of the more substantial evening meal, Richard and his sister had supper about ten o’clock.  Alice drank champagne; a few bottles remained from those dedicated to the recent festival, and Mutimer felt the necessity of explaining the presence in his house of a luxury which to his class is more than anything associated with the bloated aristocracy.  Alice drank it for the first time in her life, and her spirits grew as light as the foam upon her glass.  Brother and sister were quietly confidential as midnight drew near.

‘Shall you bring her to London?’ Alice inquired, without previous mention of Adela.

’For a week, I think.  We shall go to an hotel, of course.  She’s never seen London since she was a child.’

‘She won’t come to Highbury?’

’No.  I shall avoid that somehow.  You’ll have to come and see us at the hotel.  We’ll go to the theatre together one night.’

’What about ‘Arry?’

‘I don’t know.  I shall think about it.’

Digesting much at his ease, Richard naturally became dreamful.

‘I may have to take a house for a time now and then,’ he said.

‘In London?’

He nodded.

’I mustn’t forget you, you see, Princess.  Of course you’ll come here sometimes, but that’s not much good.  In London I dare say I can get you to know some of the right kind of people.  I want Adela to be thick with the Westlakes; then your chance’ll come.  See, old woman?’

Alice, too, dreamed.

‘I wonder you don’t want me to marry a Socialist working man,’ she said presently, as if twitting him playfully.

’You don’t understand.  One of the things we aim at is to remove the distinction between classes.  I want you to marry one of those they call gentlemen.  And you shall too, Alice!’

‘Well, but I’m not a working girl now, Dick.’

He laughed, and said it was time to go to bed.

The same evening conversation continued to a late hour between Hubert Eldon and his mother.  Hubert was returning to London the next morning.

Yesterday there had come to him two letters from Wanley, both addressed in female hand.  He knew Adela’s writing from her signature in the ‘Christian Year,’ and hastily opened the letter which came from her.  The sight of the returned sonnets checked the eager flow of his blood; he was prepared for what he afterwards read.

’Then let her meet her fate,’—­so ran his thoughts when he had perused the cold note, unassociable with the Adela he imagined in its bald formality.  ‘Only life can teach her.’

The other letter he suspected to be from Letty Tew, as it was.

’DEAR MR. ELDON,—­I cannot help writing a line to you, lest you should think that I did not keep my promise in the way you understood it.  I did indeed.  You will hear from her; she preferred to write herself, and perhaps it was better; I should only have had painful things to say.  I wish to ask you to have no unkind or unjust thoughts; I scarcely think you could have.  Please do not trouble to answer this, but believe me, yours sincerely,