Strange to think--it is Youth that holds the brush again--strange and intoxicating--that this is the woman with whom he drives in the Park, of whose family luncheon he partakes, with whom he had tea yesterday, who makes a friend of him. She talked to him an hour yesterday, told him all about that hard childhood and girlhood of hers, how she had scanty food and coarse, had to make her own frocks and wash her own handkerchiefs; she said that she feared the hard training had made her hard, yet hoped with a sigh that it was not so, and seemed to leave the question to his sovereign arbitrament. She had made the little narrow home she came from real to him with cunning touches; she had made her leap of escape from it so natural, so touching. Of what the leap had brought her she had made light, had spoken with a gentle depreciation of the place her beauty had won--"Such looks as I have helped, I suppose, besides Godfrey's position"--and let him see how much more to her taste was a quiet talk with a friend than all the functions of society. How much better than the receiving of Beauties and Potentates was a quiet hour in the twilight of her little den with Cousin Arthur! Could it be the same woman? Yes, it was. There was the wonder and the intoxication of it. He was quite unknown to all that throng. But to himself he stood among them, eminent and superior. See, hadn't she thrown him a glance--right across the room? Well, at any rate he could almost swear she had! Arthur Lisle--in the flesh at his cousin's evening party, in the spirit anywhere you like--felt a hand laid on his arm. He turned to find Sir Christopher Lance beside him. "Ah, Mr. Lisle, aren't you glad you took my advice? I told you you were missing something by not coming here. Don't you remember?" "Yes, sir, but you see, I didn't know--I didn't quite understand what you meant." "You might have thought it worth while to find out," said the old man, smiling. "As it was, I'm told you had to be fetched." Arthur laughed shamefacedly but happily. That was already a standing joke between him and Bernadette; hence the associations of it were altogether pleasant. Sir Christopher's way was not to spoil joy in the name of wisdom nor to preach a safety that was to be won through cowardice. He saw the young man's excitement and exaltation, and commended it. "Take as much of this sort of thing as you can get," he counselled, nodding his head towards the crowd and, incidentally, towards Bernadette. "Take a good dose of the world. It'll do you good. Society's an empty thing to people with empty heads, but not to the rest of us. And the more you go about, and so on--well, the fewer terrors will my Brother Pretyman possess for you." Arthur Lisle caught at the notion eagerly. "Just what I've had in my own mind, sir," he said gravely. "I thought from the look of you that you had some such wise idea in your head," said Sir Christopher with equal seriousness.