‘She has a wise head and is beautiful.’

‘And chaste.’

Arthur reddened:  he was prepared to maintain it, could not speak it.

’She is to us in this London, what the run of water was to Theocritus in Sicily:  the nearest to the visibly divine,’ he said, and was applauded.

’Good, and on you go.  Top me a few superlatives on that, and I ’m your echo, my friend.  Isn’t the seeing and listening to her like sitting under the silvery canopy of a fountain in high Summer?’

‘All the comparisons are yours,’ Arthur said enviously.

’Mr. Rhodes, you are a poet, I believe, and all you require to loosen your tongue is a drop of Bacchus, so if you will do me the extreme honour to dine with me at my Club this evening, we’ll resume the toast that should never be uttered dry.  You reprove me justly, my friend.’

Arthur laughed and accepted.  The Club was named, and the hour, and some items of the little dinner:  the birds and the year of the wines.

It surprised him to meet Mr. Redworth at the table of his host.  A greater surprise was the partial thaw in Redworth’s bearing toward him.  But, as it was partial, and he a youth and poor, not even the genial influences of Bacchus could lift him to loosen his tongue under the repressing presence of the man he knew to be his censor, though Sullivan Smith encouraged him with praises and opportunities.  He thought of the many occasions when Mrs. Warwick’s art of management had produced a tacit harmony between them.  She had no peer.  The dinner failed of the pleasure he had expected from it.  Redworth’s bluntness killed the flying metaphors, and at the end of the entertainment he and Sullivan Smith were drumming upon politics.

‘Fancies he has the key of the Irish difficulty!’ said the latter, clapping hand on his shoulder, by way of blessing, as they parted at the Club-steps.

Redworth asked Arthur Rhodes the way he was going, and walked beside him.

‘I suppose you take exercise; don’t get colds and that kind of thing,’ he remarked in the old bullying fashion; and changed it abruptly.  ’I am glad to have met you this evening.  I hope you’ll dine with me one day next week.  Have you seen Mrs. Warwick lately?’

‘She is unwell; she has been working too hard,’ said Arthur.

‘Seriously unwell, do you mean?’

‘Lady Dunstane is at her house, and speaks of her recovering.’

‘Ah.  You’ve not seen her?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Well, good-night.’

Redworth left him, and only when moved by gratitude to the lad for his mention of Mrs. Warwick’s ‘working too hard,’ as the cause of her illness, recollected the promised dinner and the need for having his address.