idol—­Gold.  Education!  Is it education to teach the young that their chances of happiness depend on being richer than their neighbours?  Yet that is what it all tends to.  Get on!—­be successful!  Trample on others, but push forward yourself!  Money, money!—­let its chink be your music; let its yellow shine be fairer than the eyes of love or friendship!  Let its piles accumulate and ever accumulate!  There are beggars in the streets, but they are impostors!  There is poverty in many places, but why seek to relieve it?  Why lessen the sparkling heaps of gold by so much as a coin?  Accumulate and ever accumulate!  Live so, and then—­die!  And then—­who knows what then?”

His voice had been full of ringing eloquence as he spoke, but at these last words it sank into a low, thrilling tone of solemnity and earnestness.  We all looked at him, fascinated by his manner, and were silent.

Mr. Challoner was the first to break the impressive pause.

“I’m not a speaker, sir,” he observed slowly, “but I’ve got a good deal of feeling somewheres; and you’ll allow me to say that I feel your words—­I think they’re right true.  I’ve often wanted to say what you’ve said, but haven’t seen my way clear to it.  Anyhow, I’ve had a very general impression about me that what we call Society has of late years been going, per express service, direct to the devil—­ if the ladies will excuse me for plain speaking.  And as the journey is being taken by choice and free-will, I suppose there’s no hindrance or stoppage possible.  Besides, it’s a downward line, and curiously free from obstructions.”

“Bravo, John!” exclaimed Mrs. Challoner.  “You are actually corning out!  I never heard you indulge in similes before.”

“Well, my dear,” returned her husband, somewhat gratified, “better late than never.  A simile is a good thing if it isn’t overcrowded.  For instance, Mr. Swinburne’s similes are laid on too thick sometimes.  There is a verse of his, which, with all my admiration for him, I never could quite fathom.  It is where he earnestly desires to be as ‘Any leaf of any tree;’ or, failing that, he wouldn’t mind becoming ‘As bones under the deep, sharp sea.’  I tried hard to see the point of that, but couldn’t fix it.”

We all laughed.  Zara, I thought, was especially merry, and looked her loveliest.  She made an excellent hostess, and exerted herself to the utmost to charm—­an effort in which she easily succeeded.

The shadow on the face of her brother had not disappeared, and once or twice I noticed that Father Paul looked at him with a certain kindly anxiety.

The dinner approached its end.  The dessert, with its luxurious dishes of rare fruit, such as peaches, plantains, hothouse grapes, and even strawberries, was served, and with it a delicious, sparkling, topaz-tinted wine of Eastern origin called Krula, which was poured out to us in Venetian glass goblets, wherein lay diamond-like lumps of ice.  The air was so exceedingly oppressive that evening that we found this beverage most refreshing.  When Zara’s goblet was filled, she held it up smiling, and said: