‘I can only say that I am sorry to hear it,’ fell from her tightened lips, after a moment’s pause.

Instantly Godwin’s pride expelled the softer emotion.  He pressed hard with his feet upon the floor, every nerve in his body tense with that distressing passion peculiar to the shyly arrogant.  Regard him, and you had imagined he was submitting to rebuke for an offence he could not deny.

Lady Whitelaw waited.  A minute, almost, and Peak gave no sign of opening his mouth.

‘It is certainly much to be regretted,’ she said at length, coolly.  ’Of course, I don’t know what prospects you may have in London, but, if you had remained at the College, something advantageous would no doubt have offered before long.’

There went small tact to the wording of this admonition.  Impossible for Lady Whitelaw to understand the complexities of a character such as Godwin’s, even had she enjoyed opportunities of studying it; but many a woman of the world would have directed herself more cautiously after reading that letter of his.  Peak’s impulse was to thank her for the past, and declare that henceforth he would dispense with aid; only the choking in his throat obstructed some such utterance.  He resented profoundly her supposition (natural enough) that his chief aim was to establish himself in a self-supporting career.  What?  Am I to be grateful for a mere chance of earning my living?  Have I not shown that I am capable of something more than the ordinary lot in life?  From the heights of her assured independence, does she look down upon me as a young man seeking a ‘place’?  He was filled with wrath, and all because a good, commonplace woman could not divine that he dreamt of European fame.

‘I am very sorry that I can’t take that into account,’ he managed to say.  ’I wish to give this next year exclusively to scientific study, and after that I shall see what course is open to me.’

He was not of the men who can benefit by patronage, and be simply grateful for it.  His position was a false one:  to be begging with awkward show of thankfulness for a benefaction which in his heart he detested.  He knew himself for an undesigning hypocrite, and felt that he might as well have been a rascal complete.  Gratitude!  No man capable of it in fuller measure than he; but not to such persons as Lady Whitelaw.  Before old Sir Job he could more easily have bowed himself.  But this woman represented the superiority of mere brute wealth, against which his soul rebelled.

There was another disagreeable silence, during which Lady Whitelaw commented on her protege very much as Mrs. Warricombe had done.

‘Will you allow me to ask,’ she said at length, with cold politeness, ‘whether you have acquaintances in London?’

‘Yes.  I know some one who studied at the School of Mines.’

’Well, Mr. Peak, I see that your mind is made up.  And no doubt you are the best judge of your private circumstances.  I must ask you to let me think over the matter for a day or two.  I will write to you.’