“Oh no,” cried Effie, with once more a sense of the ludicrous in this assertion. But Fred was as grave as an owl, and meant every word he said. “Yes, indeed, and they deserve to be so; but if I may tell them that you forgive them----” “It is not worth speaking about, Mr. Dirom; I was foolish too. And are you really going to have Americans here? I never saw any Americans. What interest would they take in our old churchyard, and Adam Fleming’s broken old gravestone?” “They take more interest in that sort of thing than we do whom it belongs to; that is to say, it doesn’t belong to us. I am as much a new man as any Yankee, and have as little right. We are mere interlopers, you know.” Fred said this with a charming smile he had, a smile full of frank candour and openness, which forestalled criticism. Effie had heard the same sentiment expressed by others with a very different effect. When Fred said it, it seemed a delightful absurdity. He laughed a little, and so, carried away by sympathetic feeling, did she, shame-faced and feeling guilty in her heart at the remembrance of the many times in which, without any sense of absurdity, she had heard the same words said. “We are a queer family,” he continued in his pleasant explanatory way. “My father is the money-maker, and he thinks a great deal of it; but we make no money, and I think we are really as indifferent about it as if we had been born in the backwoods. If anything happened at the office I should take to my studio, and I hope I should not enjoy myself too much, but there would be the danger. ‘Ah, freedom is a noble thing,’ as old Barbour says.” Effie did not know who old Barbour was, and she was uncertain how to reply. She said at last timidly, “But you could not do without a great deal of money, Mr. Dirom. You have everything you want, and you don’t know how it comes. It is like a fairy tale.” Fred smiled again with an acquiescence which had pleasure in it. Though he made so little of his advantages, he liked to hear them recognized. “You are right,” he said, “as you always are, Miss Ogilvie. You seem to know things by instinct. But all the same we don’t stand on these things; we are a little Bohemian, all of us young ones. I suppose you would think it something dreadful if you had to turn out of Gilston. But we should rather like any such twist of the whirligig of fortune. The girls would think it fun.”