‘Sir,’ he said, ‘speak with Carrie? I will speak with her, yes, and court her, yes, and marry her—that I’ll do if Heaven so send that she’ll have me.’ ‘On how long acquaintance have you taken this resolve?’ asked his father dryly. ‘Three weeks, sir.’ ‘Ah, long enough assuredly for so unimportant a step to be considered!’ Phil was too acute not to see that his adversary had scored here. He had, moreover, a trait of age seldom to be noticed in the young: he could laugh at his own foibles. He laughed now, well amused at his ardour, and, dropping lightly on his knees beside his father’s chair, took Meadowes’ long white hand in his with his sudden irresistible impetuosity. ‘Sir, will you not tell me the story of your heart?’ he said. ‘Sure every man alive hath felt as I feel now!’ ‘My heart! ’twould be a history indeed,’ said Meadowes. He spoke uneasily, for he had reached that stage of moral decay which refuses to answer any serious questioning. With a quick shuffle of the conversational cards he passed on:— ‘A history indeed.—But to return to the subject in hand from which you try to escape: you have known Caroline Shepley for three weeks; you wish to marry her; I do not intend that you should; therefore there the case stands.’ Phil had risen and stood before his father again. There is nothing more irritating to the finer feelings than to have questions, which we put in all seriousness, answered lightly. Phil had for a moment thought he might gain his father’s confidence, but he had been mistaken. He felt jarred and baffled. ‘I am sorry, sir. I shall take my own way,’ he said. ‘Then I shall have no more to do with you, Philip.’ ‘Then I shall have to provide for myself. You have at least given me brains enough for that,’ said Phil hotly. ‘Do you think so? Well, brains are a good gift, better perhaps than gold.’ Phil stared at his father for a moment in blank amazement, then he turned on his heel and left the room without a word. CHAPTER XX After Philip had gone, Richard Meadowes leaned back in his chair with closed eyes for a long time. The past was stirred in him by this quarrel. In the twenty years that had elapsed since Anne Champion’s death he had changed very little outwardly; but the soul had travelled a long road these twenty years. Now looking back over the ‘Past’s enormous disarray’ he scarcely recognised himself for the same man he had been. He that had started so eagerly in the race, how he lagged now! he had not an enthusiasm left, and smiled to remember all he used to have. At one time too he remembered having thought about things spiritual; these did not visit him now. Once even he had feared death and judgment; death now-a-days had ceased to appall him, and for judgment he thought of it as an old-world fable. He could even think of Anne Champion’s sad story and her cruel end with no more than a momentary pang of discomfort.