Some days before Easter week Seymour Austin went to Mount Laurels for rest, at an express invitation from Colonel Halkett.  The working barrister, who is also a working member of Parliament, is occasionally reminded that this mortal machine cannot adapt itself in perpetuity to the long hours of labour by night in the House of Commons as well as by day in the Courts, which would seem to have been arranged by a compliant country for the purpose of aiding his particular, and most honourable, ambition to climb, while continuing to fill his purse.  Mr. Austin broke down early in the year.  He attributed it to a cold.  Other representative gentlemen were on their backs, of whom he could admit that the protracted nightwork had done them harm, with the reservation that their constitutions were originally unsound.  But the House cannot get on without lawyers, and lawyers must practise their profession, and if they manage both to practise all day and sit half the night, others should be able to do the simple late sitting; and we English are an energetic people, we must toil or be beaten:  and besides, ‘night brings counsel,’ men are cooler and wiser by night.  Any amount of work can be performed by careful feeders:  it is the stomach that kills the Englishman.  Brains are never the worse for activity; they subsist on it.

These arguments and citations, good and absurd, of a man more at home in his harness than out of it, were addressed to the colonel to stop his remonstrances and idle talk about burning the candle at both ends.  To that illustration Mr. Austin replied that he did not burn it in the middle.

‘But you don’t want money, Austin.’

‘No; but since I’ve had the habit of making it I have taken to like it.’

‘But you’re not ambitious.’

‘Very little; but I should be sorry to be out of the tideway.’

‘I call it a system of slaughter,’ said the colonel; and Mr. Austin said, ‘The world goes in that way—­love and slaughter.’

‘Not suicide though,’ Colonel Halkett muttered.

‘No, that’s only incidental.’

The casual word ‘love’ led Colonel Halkett to speak to Cecilia of an old love-affair of Seymour Austin’s, in discussing the state of his health with her.  The lady was the daughter of a famous admiral, handsome, and latterly of light fame.  Mr. Austin had nothing to regret in her having married a man richer than himself.

‘I wish he had married a good woman,’ said the colonel.

‘He looks unwell, papa.’

‘He thinks you’re looking unwell, my dear.’

‘He thinks that of me?’

Cecilia prepared a radiant face for Mr. Austin.

She forgot to keep it kindled, and he suspected her to be a victim of one of the forms of youthful melancholy, and laid stress on the benefit to health of a change of scene.

‘We have just returned from Wales,’ she said.

He remarked that it was hardly a change to be within shot of our newspapers.