He leaned forward in his chair and looked hard at me; he did not apparently expect any answer to his oration, but he had touched on a subject which was near my mother's heart, and I felt so uneasy that I moved from my seat and leaned against one of the posts of the verandah. "Don't you exaggerate what my brother wants?" my mother asked. "He knows too well the value of time to wish to waste that of anybody, and he loves Oxford." "Too well," the Warden jerked out, as if he was an automatic arrangement and some one had touched a spring. "I don't think any one could love Oxford too well, and I should be sorry if Godfrey did not learn something from his life there which could help him to sympathize with other people." I knew that I was bound to be pulled in sooner or later, and I thought of disappearing behind my post and of leaving the Warden to say what he liked. "The sympathies of your son are already as wide as those of a Charity Organization Society, and, I venture to say, as misdirected," the Warden returned, and seemed to have forgotten that I was standing in front of him, but if he was going to say things about me I decided to stay and hear them. "I find him the most pleasant companion, he has the gift of silence--Meredith wrote--'Who cannot talk!--but who can?'--he is also amusing, always unconsciously. I have great hopes that he may become a man who will not waste his youth in vain struggles with a ball. Had I the power I would banish all balls from England for one short year, the experiment would be entertaining." "It would result in a national dyspepsia," my mother said, laughing. "Godfrey would play catch with an orange," Nina remarked. The Warden looked up and saw me. "An orange bursts," he said. "I must return to my hotel. Would you find me a conveyance, one with a coachman as unlike a furious driver as possible?" he asked, and as Nina came with me he was left alone with my mother. I don't know what he said during those few minutes, but when we got back I found my mother smiling placidly, though when I had gone away I was certain that she disapproved of the Warden most thoroughly. "The Warden wishes you to dine with him to-night," she said to me, and without waiting for me to reply she went on to say how sorry my father would be to miss him. The Warden began to express regrets at my father's absence, but forgot what he was talking about in the middle of his sentence, and finished up by telling the driver to go very slowly. As he stepped into the vehicle I had found for him, he expressed a fervent hope that it was more robust than it appeared to be. "What a funny old man!" Nina exclaimed as soon as he had gone, "and what nonsense he talks. He is a dear, but he does look odd!" "He looks like a gentleman, and is one," my mother replied. "You didn't like him at first," I said to her.