“Indeed I hope not!—­Have you done your letters?  Do come up and watch Mrs. Smithson playing at quoits—­a sight to rout the brood of cares!”

In the smoking-room on deck sat Dr. Derwent and Arnold Jacks, conversing gravely, with subdued voices.  The Doctor had a smile on his meditative features; his eyes were cast down he looked a trifle embarrassed.

“Forgive me,” Arnold was saying, with some earnestness, “if this course seems to you rather irregular.”

“Not at all!  Not at all!  But I can only assure you of my honest inability to answer the question.  Try, my dear fellow! Solvitur quaerendo!”

Jacks’ behaviour did, in fact, appear to the Doctor a little odd.  That the young man should hint at his desire to ask Miss Derwent to marry him, or perhaps ask the parental approval of such a step, was natural enough; the event had been looming since the beginning of the voyage home.  But to go beyond this, to ask the girl’s father whether he thought success likely, whether he could hold out hopes, was scarcely permissible.  It seemed a curious failure of tact in such a man as Arnold Jacks.

The fact was that Arnold for the first time in his life, had turned coward.  Having drifted into a situation which he had always regarded as undesirable, and had felt strong enough to avoid, he lost his head, and clutched rather wildly at the first support within reach.  That Irene Derwent should become his wife was not a vital matter; he could contemplate quite coolly the possibility of marrying some one else, or, if it came to that, of not marrying anyone at all.  What shook his nerves was the question whether Irene would be sure to accept him.

Six months ago, he had no doubt of it.  He viewed Miss Derwent with an eye accustomed to scrutinise, to calculate (in things Imperial and other), and it amused him to reflect that she might be numbered among, say, half a dozen eligible women who would think it an honour to marry him.  This was his way of viewing marriage; it was on the woman’s side a point of ambition, a gratification of vanity; on the man a dignified condescension.  Arnold conceived himself a brilliant match for any girl below the titled aristocracy; he had grown so accustomed to magnify his place, to regard himself as one of the pillars of the Empire, that he attributed the same estimate to all who knew him.  Of personal vanity he had little; purely personal characteristics did not enter, he imagined, into a man’s prospects of matrimony.  Certain women openly flattered him, and these he despised.  His sense of fitness demanded a woman intelligent enough to appreciate what he had to offer, and sufficiently well-bred to conceal her emotions when he approached her.  These conditions Miss Derwent fulfilled.  Personally she would do him credit (a wife, of course, must he presentable, though in the husband appearance did not matter), and her obvious social qualities would be useful.  Yet he had had no serious thought of proposing to her.  For one thing, she was not rich enough.