"Come into the garden, my boy," said George, who had now resumed his coat, linking his arm in that of Charles and leading him out through the open French window, into the rose-scented garden, "and let's talk things over. It's the pity of the world we weren't always friends. Damn the fish stream and all the fish in it! I wish they'd been boiled before they were spawned. What's the _good_ of fighting? Isn't life too short for fighting and divisions? Sure, there's a rose as big as a red cabbage, but you should see the roses at my house in Highgate--and where did you meet Miss Pursehouse?" "Oh," said Charles. "I've known her for some time." "We met her in Paris, Fanny--that's my daughter--and me met her in Paris. Fanny doesn't care for her much, and wouldn't come with me; but there's never a woman in the world that really cares for another woman, unless the other woman is as ugly as sin and a hundred. There's a melon house for you, but you should see my melon houses in Highgate, the one's I am going to have built by Arthur Lawrence of Cockspur Street; he's made a speciality of glass, but he charges cruel. It's the passion of my life, a garden." He leaned over the gate leading to the kitchen-garden, and whistled an old Irish hunting song softly to himself as he contemplated the cabbages and peas. Charles lit a cigar. He was a fine figure of a man, this Lambert; one of those large natures in a large frame that dwarf other individualities when brought in contact with them. Hamilton Cox would pass in a crowd, and Professor Wilson was not unimpressive, but beside George Lambert, Hamilton-Cox looked a shrimp, and the Oxford professor somewhat shrivelled. "It's the passion of my life," reiterated Fanny Lambert's father, addressing the cabbages, the marrow fat peas, Charles Bevan, and the distant woods of Sussex. "And if I'd stuck to it and left horses alone, a richer man I'd have been this day." "I say," said Charles, who had been plunged in meditation, "why did Hancock telegraph to you, I wonder? It wasn't exactly solicitors' etiquette; the proper course, I think, would have been to communicate with your lawyers, Messrs Sykes and Fagan." George Lambert broke into a low, mellow laugh. "Faith," he said, "I suppose he did communicate with them, and they answered that they weren't my lawyers any more. I've fought with them, and that's a fact; and now that we're friends, you and me, I've an idea of transferring my business to Hancock. I've one or two little suits pending; and I'm not sure but one of them won't be with Fagan for the names I called him in his own office before his own clerks. 'I'll have you indicted for slander,' he says. 'Slander!' said I, 'slander, you old clothes-bag, have me up for slander, and I'll beat the dust out of your miserable reputation in any court in the kingdom, ye old wandering-Jew-come-to-roost,' and with that I left the office, and never will I set my foot in it again." "I should think not."