A smile began to creep about the corners of his mouth. For himself, it is very likely that Spears would have had virtue enough to carry out his own principles and resist all bribes of rank had they been thrown in his way; but he contemplated the possible elevation of his child with a tender sense of the wonderful, and the ludicrous, and incredible which melted all sterner feelings. The idea that Janet might be “my lady” filled him with a subdued pleasure and amusement, and a subtle pride which veiled itself in the humour of the notion. It made him smile in spite of himself. As for Fairfax, this had so completely taken his breath away that he seemed beyond the power of speech, and Spears went on musingly for a minute or two walking beside him, his active thoughts lulled by the fantastic pleasure of that vision, and the smile still lingered about his closely-shut lips. At last he started from the weakness of this reverie. “There is to be a meeting to-night,” he said, “down in one of these streets--and I’m going to give them an address. I’ve got the name of the street here in my pocket and the house and all that--if you like to come.” “Certainly I will come,” said Fairfax with alacrity. He had not much to occupy his evenings, and he took a kind of careless speculative interest, not like Paul’s impassioned adoption of the scheme and all its issues, in Spears’s political crusade. The demagogue patted him on the shoulders once more as he left him. He had always half-patronised, half stood in awe of Fairfax, whose careless humour sometimes threw a passing light of ridicule even on the cause. “If you see Markham, bring him along with you; and tell him I must understand what he means,” he said. But Fairfax did not see Paul again. He did not indeed put himself in the way of Paul, though his mind was full of him, for the rest of the day. Janet Spears was a new complication in Paul’s way. The whole situation was dreary and hopeless enough. His position as head in his house and family, the importance, his wealth, his power of influencing others, all taken from him in a day, and Spears’s daughter--Janet Spears--hung round his neck like a millstone. Paul! of all men in the world to get into such a vulgar complication, Paul was about the last. And yet there could be no mistake about it. Fairfax, who honestly felt himself Paul’s inferior in everything, heard this news with the wondering dismay of one whose own thoughts had taken a direction as much above him (he thought) as the other’s was beneath him. With a painful flush of bewilderment, he thought of himself floated up into regions above himself into a different atmosphere, another world, by means of the woman who had been Paul’s companion all his life, while Paul---- He had heard of such things; of men falling into the mire out of the purest places, of rebellions from the best to the worst. They were common enough. But that it should be _Paul_!