Lady Markham took an unfair advantage of this devotion. She plied him with questions--subtle and skilful--not always about Paul, but coming back to Paul with many a wily twist and turn. She threw herself with the warmest pretence of interest into his own career--what he was doing, how his studies were being directed, what his future was to be? Was it a pretence? No, it was not altogether a pretence. She could not but be polite, and true politeness cannot but be interested. She was pleased that he should tell her about himself, and a kind of shadow of an anxiety that he too should do well came into her mind--a shadow faint and vague of her great anxiety and longing that Paul should do well, better than any one had ever done before. And like a lark descending in circles of cautious approach to her home, she came back to Paul when her young companion was off his guard, when she had beguiled him to babble of himself. “Ah!” she said, “I fear you are both idle, both Paul and you,” when Fairfax had been making confession of sundry shortcomings. “No, Markham is not like me,” he said. “Markham puts more of himself into everything; he does not take things lightly as I do. He is a more serious fellow altogether. That makes me rather fear Spears’s influence over him, if you will let me say so.” “Indeed I will let you say so,” Paul’s mother replied. “That is just what makes me unhappy. He is a great deal with Mr. Spears?” “One time and another--yes, they have seen a great deal of each other,” Fairfax said. “Perhaps you don’t know, Spears is the most entertaining fellow. He has his own opinion about everything. I think myself he is wrong just as often as he is right; but he has his own way of looking at things. I don’t go with him in half he says, but I like to hear him talk----” “And his house is a pleasant place to go to?” said the anxious mother. “Excuse me if I don’t quite know. He is not in any kind of society, but he has a family? It is a pleasant house?” Fairfax stared and then he laughed. “It is not a house at all, in the way you think of,” he said. “I don’t suppose you can form any idea--we go and talk to him in his workshop. There is no sort of ceremony. He will hold forth for the hour when he is in the vein, and he is very entertaining--but as for what you understand by a pleasant house----” Lady Markham’s heart grew lighter every moment. “But he has a family?” she said. “Oh, yes--there are girls, I believe,” said Fairfax. Was he on his guard? She almost feared the directness of this question had put him on his guard. “One sees them sometimes running out and in, but that has nothing to do with it,” he added, carelessly. “In his class it is not at all the same as in other ranks of life.”