‘Now, I don’t call that fair, but the very reverse,’ said Michael, emphatically. ‘She would have just as much right to go to Miss Wynter and say, “Never mind! When we are wed, the Red Gables alliance must come to an end.”’ ‘Oh no! There’s a great difference.’ ‘Yes, there is. There is the difference that you could make her give up Miss Wynter, and that she could not make you give up me.’ ‘No one makes me give up my friend,’ said Roger, deliberately; ‘neither wife nor mistress, nor any one else. It is no true wife’s part to wish to separate her husband and his friends.’ ‘A wife has the strictest right to say the same thing with regard to her husband. And you have not a shadow of right, Roger, to say she shall not know Miss Wynter when she is married to you. If you make it a _sine quâ non_, you ought to tell her so in advance.’ ‘You are very hot about it. I’d as soon she had a serpent for a friend as——’ He nodded expressively. ‘Well, I say you have no right to say so,’ said Michael, ‘and I recommend you to think it over on your way down. You talk about educating her where she is deficient—poor little thing! but it isn’t education to say “you shall” and “you shall not.”’ ‘You may be right,’ said Roger, deliberately. ‘Only, please, do me the justice to own that I did not say how I should stop the alliance. I only said it should come to an end. There is such a thing as persuasion.’ ‘Oh, if you are going to get out of it in that way——’ ‘Good night,’ said Roger, amiably. ‘Don’t leap so readily to conclusions another time.’ With which he went out, leaving Michael laughing to himself. The latter had once again to turn out in the raw November air, to see some patients in the town. As he returned, he passed the shop of Mr. Dixon, the Bradstane stationer, and looking up, saw a bright light burning behind the red curtains of the windows on the second story. Distant sounds of music also came to his ears. He smiled and sighed, both at once; and in his mind there were running thoughts, almost identical with those which Roger Camm had thought of Michael’s own engagement, eight years ago, to Magdalen Wynter. ‘If she is the girl to make him happy, well and good. But I wish he had chosen differently. He talks about marrying into his own sphere—such bosh! Small shopkeepers are not his sphere, let him say what he likes. If Ada Dixon had been a squire’s daughter, I suppose he would have discovered that after all he was a clergyman’s son, and a gentleman, her social equal. Now it suits him better to call himself a working man, and say that like must wed like, to be happy. It is a pity; he might have had a career, only she drags him back.’ He called at Dr. Rowntree’s, and had half an hour’s chat with the old man; then back to his own house, his pipe, and a treatise on some new surgical experiments with which it behoved him to make acquaintance. CHAPTER XVII ROGER CAMM’S COURTING