"Well, then, I'll do it at once, though I don't much like it, I can tell you." "Whatever may be the result, it's best you should know it soon, Gordon. Nothing unfits a man for every thing so much as being in a state of doubt." "I'll end mine at once, Charley. No; not at once. I must first see if that Botanical-Fête arrangement is coming off, and after that I'll speak to her father. Devilish solemn phrase that, eh, Charley!" "It won't be so dreadful in carrying out as it sounds, my boy. Clear out now; you shan't have another instant!" Gordon Frere nodded laughingly at his friend; and after making a hurried toilet in his own room started off for Queen Anne Street, while Charles Yeldham seated himself at his desk. But not to work; his mind was too full for that. The short light conversation just recorded had given Charles Yeldham matter for much deliberation. When a man's life is thoroughly engrossed by mental work, the few humanising influences which he allows to operate on him are infinitely more absorbing than the thousand fleeting affections of the light-hearted and the thoughtless. When Charles Yeldham gave his thoughts a holiday from his conveyancing, and turned them from the attorneys who employed him and the work which they brought him to do, his mind reverted generally to the loved ones in the vicarage at home or to the two men whose friendship he had time and opportunity to cultivate. Never was younger brother better loved than was Gordon Frere by the large-hearted, large-brained philosopher whose chambers he shared. It was indeed from the elder-brother point of view that Yeldham regarded Frere. As a boy Gordon had been the one private pupil whom the old vicar had admitted into his house; and later in life he had passed two long vacations reading at the seaside with his old tutor and the members of his family. Charley loved the young man with all the large capacity of his loving nature, looked with the most lenient eye on his boyish frivolities and dissipations, and had hitherto never feared for his future, hoping that he would settle down into some useful career before he thought of settling himself for life. But the conversation just held had entirely changed his ideas. Gordon, unstable, unsettled, without any means or resources, had announced his intention of taking a wife. And what a wife! Of the young lady herself Yeldham knew nothing; but certain pleadings which he had drawn some twelve months beforehand in a case which never came into court, and which had been settled by mutual arrangement, had given him a very clear insight into the character of Mr. Edward Scrope Guyon, and into that worthy gentleman's resources and manner of life. With such a man Yeldham felt perfectly certain that an impecunious scion of a good family like Gordon Frere coming as a pretender for his daughter's hand would not have the smallest chance of success; and it was with a heavy heart that he sat idly sketching figures on his