’Well, he has taken the best means, I should say, to remind himself of actualities,’ rejoined the youth.  ’But what a man he is!  How did he behave in church this morning?’

‘You should have come to see,’ said Mrs. Waltham, mildly censuring her son’s disregard of the means of grace.

‘I like Mr. Wyvern,’ observed Adela, who was standing at the window looking out upon the dusking valley.

‘Oh, you would like any man in parsonical livery,’ scoffed her brother.

Alfred shortly betook himself to the garden, where, in spite of a decided freshness in the atmosphere, he walked for half-an-hour smoking a pipe.  When he entered the house again, he met Adela at the foot of the stairs.

‘Mrs. Mewling has just come in,’ she whispered.

‘All right, I’ll come up with you,’ was the reply.  ’Heaven defend me from her small talk!’

They ascended to a very little room, which made a kind of boudoir for Adela.  Alfred struck a match and lit a lamp, disclosing a nest of wonderful purity and neatness.  On the table a drawing-board was slanted; it showed a text of Scripture in process of ‘illumination.’

‘Still at that kind of thing!’ exclaimed Alfred.  ’My good child, if you want to paint, why don’t you paint in earnest?  Really, Adela, I must enter a protest!  Remember that you are eighteen years of age.’

‘I don’t forget it, Alfred.’

’At eight-and-twenty, at eight-and-thirty, you propose still to be at the same stage of development?’

‘I don’t think we’ll talk of it,’ said the girl quietly.  ’We don’t understand each other.’

’Of course not, but we might, if only you’d read sensible books that I could give you.’

Adela shook her head.  The philosophical youth sank into his favourite attitude—­legs extended, hands in pockets, nose in air.

‘So, I suppose,’ he said presently, ’that fellow really has been ill?’

Adela was sitting in thought; she looked up with a shadow of annoyance on her face.

‘That fellow?’

‘Eldon, you know.’

‘I want to ask you a question,’ said his sister, interlocking her fingers and pressing them against her throat.  ’Why do you always speak in a contemptuous way of Mr. Eldon?’

‘You know I don’t like the individual.’

‘What cause has “the individual” given you?’

‘He’s a snob.’

‘I’m not sure that I know what that means,’ replied Adela, after thinking for a moment with downcast eyes.

’Because you never read anything.  He’s a fellow who raises a great edifice of pretence on rotten foundations.’

’What can you mean?  Mr. Eldon is a gentleman.  What pretence is he guilty of?’

‘Gentleman!’ uttered her brother with much scorn.  ’Upon my word, that is the vulgarest of denominations!  Who doesn’t call himself so nowadays!  A man’s a man, I take it, and what need is there to lengthen the name?  Thank the powers, we don’t live in feudal ages.  Besides, he doesn’t seem to me to be what you imply.’