Whatever the gulf, the difference, might be--broad or narrow, justly felt or utterly exaggerated--Arthur Lisle would have been (at twenty-four) more than human not to be pleased to find himself, for Mrs. Norton Ward, on the same side of it as Mrs. Norton Ward. She was evidently quite genuine in this, as she seemed to be in everything. She was not flattering him or even putting him at his ease. She talked to him as "one of ourselves" simply because that seemed to her what he undoubtedly was--and what his friends undoubtedly, though of course quite blamelessly, were not. They were thus in the full swing of talk--Arthur doing most of it--when the Judge came across the room and joined them. Arthur at once rose, to make way, and the lady too seemed to treat his audience as finished, although most graciously. But the Judge took hold of his arm and detained him. "Do you know, Esther," he said, "that this young man has, by right of kinship, the _entrée_ to the Shrine? And he doesn't use it!" "What?" she cried with an appearance of lively interest. "Oh, are you related to the Godfreys, Mr. Lisle?" Arthur blushed, but this time less acutely; he was getting, as the Judge might have put it, much inured to this matter of the Godfrey Lisles. "Don't ask him questions about it; for some reason or another he doesn't like that." "I don't really think my cousin Godfrey would care about----" "Not the least the point, is it, Esther?" said the Judge with a twinkle. "Not the least, Sir Christopher. But what's to be done if he won't go?" "Oh, you must manage that." He squeezed Arthur's arm and then let it go. Here, plainly, though no less graciously than from the hostess, was his dismissal. Not knowing any of the other women, he drifted back to the girl who was enthusiastic about lawn-tennis. The Judge sat down and stretched out his shapely thin hands towards the fire; his rings gleamed, and he loved the gleam of them. To wear them had been, from his youth, one of his bits of daring; he had, as it were, backed himself to wear them and not thereby seem himself, or let them seem, vulgar. And he had succeeded; he had been called vain often, never vulgar. By now his friends, old and young, would have missed them sadly. "What do you make of that boy, Esther?" he asked. "I like him--and I think he's being wasted," she answered promptly. "At our honourable profession?" "You and Frank are better judges of that." "I don't know. Hardly tough enough, perhaps. But Huntley was just such a man, and he got pretty well to the top. Died, though, not much past fifty. The climb killed him, I think." "Yes, Frank's told me about him. But I meant wasted in his own life, or socially, or however you like to put it. He's told me about his friends, and----" "Well, if you like him enough, you can put that right, Esther." "I like him, but I haven't much time for young men, Sir Christopher. I've a husband, you may remember."