He had grown stouter, he still wore a long black frock coat, and now looked like a policeman. His commonplace good looks had changed to a ponderous regularity of feature. But Alfred was instinctively a gentleman, and he made no allusion to her painting that might lead Mildred to suppose that he thought that she had failed. That a young girl like Mildred should have chosen to live with such people as the Delacours, worse still, to have wasted a large part of her fortune in their shocking paper, was a matter which he avoided as carefully as she would the Divorce Court, in the presence of a man whose wife has just left him. As for marrying Mildred he didn't know what to think. She was a pretty woman, and for him something of the old charm still lingered. But his practical mind saw the danger of taking so flighty a minded person into the respectability of a British home. He had loved her, he still liked her, he didn't mind admitting that, but he was no longer a fool about her. She had spent her money, nearly all of it, and he couldn't afford to marry a fortuneless girl. She would be an heiress if her brother died, and he might die at any moment, he suffered from heart disease. Alfred liked Harold, and did not wish his death, but if Harold did go off suddenly Alfred saw no reason why he should not ask Mildred to marry him. He liked her as well as any other girl; he thought he would make her a good husband, he would be able to manage her better than any other man, he was sure of that, because he understood her. She was a queer one: but he thought they'd get along all right. But all this was in the future, so long as Harold lived he'd keep on just as he was; if she met a man she liked better she could have him. He had got on very well without her for the last five years; there was no hurry, he could afford to wait if she couldn't. She had thrown him over to go to Paris to paint; she had come back a failure, and now she wanted him to marry, because it suited her convenience. She could wait. Sometimes his mood was gentler. 'If she did throw me over it wasn't for any other fellow, she always had odd ideas. It was because she was clever. I never cared for any girl as I did for her. By Jove, I think I'd sooner marry her than any one else. I wish she hadn't spent all her money on that damned socialistic paper.' At the thought of the paper Alfred's face clouded, and he remembered that Harold had gone into the house to get him a cigar: he was longing for a smoke. Mildred was standing at a little distance talking to a group of players who had just finished a set, and he was about to ask her where her brother was, when he thought he would go and look for Harold himself.