uttering serious opinions.  With the more numerous class of ladies, who neither were nor affected to be anything but delightful chatterboxes, he could frolic on the lightest airs of society gossip.  He was fast making of himself an artist in talk; woe to him, if he began to discover that exertion of his brain was waste of time, since his more obvious ends could be gained equally well without it.  As yet, though hints of such a mood had come to him, he did not give way to the temptations of loquacious idleness; he still worked, and purposed to work still harder.  Just of late he had spent a good deal of time in rooms not exactly arranged for purposes of study—­but for this there was a special reason.

An hour later, when most of the visitors were departed, he went to Beatrice’s corner of the room.

‘When shall, I call for you?’ he asked, standing before her.

‘Oh, but you will dine here?’

She leaned forward, looking up into his face.  The gaze would have intoxicated most men; Wilfrid kept his calm smile.

‘No, I am sorry to say I can’t,’ was his reply.  ’I have things to see to at home.  Will 8.15 do?’

‘Quite well; I need not be at the hall before a quarter to nine.’

His father came up.

‘Walking my way, Wilf?’

‘Yes, and in a hurry.  I think we must have a hansom.’

Father and son still lived together, in the same house as formerly.  After a brief stretch of pavement, they hailed a conveyance.

‘Going to St. James’s Hall, I suppose?’ Mr. Athel asked, as they drove on.

Wilfrid gave an affirmative.

‘Is it the last time?’

The other laughed.

‘I can’t say.  I fear it troubles you.’

Mr. Athel had, we know, long passed the time when the ardours of youth put him above the prejudices of the solid Englishman.  When it was first announced to him that Beatrice was going to sing on a public platform, he screwed up his lips as if something acid had fallen upon them; he scarcely credited the story till his own eyes saw the girl’s name in print.  ‘What the deuce!’ was his exclamation.  ’It would be all very well if she had to do it for her living, but she certainly owes it to her friends to preserve the decencies as long as there is no need to violate them.’  The reasons advanced he utterly refused to weigh.  Since then events had come to pass which gave him even a nearer interest in Miss Redwing, and his protests had grown serious.

‘Why, yes,’ he answered now, ’it does trouble me, and not a little.  I very strongly advise you to put an end to it.  Let her sing in her friends’ houses; there’s no objection to that.  But to have her name on—­great heavens!—­on placards!  No, no; it must stop, Wilf.  Every day it becomes more imperative.  Your position demands that she should become a private lady.’

Wilfrid knew well that the question could not be argued, and, in his secret mind, there was just a little tendency to take his father’s view.  He would never have allowed this shade of thought to appear in his speech; but was he not an Englishman and a member of Parliament?