justify the rumour that there were bets about town as to the issue of his already protracted courtship. It was food for curiosity to see a young man of his pattern—one of the few “earnest” young men of the Tory side, with an income sufficient for tastes more vivid than those by which he was known—make up to a lady several years older than himself, whose fund of Texan slang was even larger than her stock of dollars. Mrs. Headway had got a good many new ideas since her arrival in London, but she had also not lost her grasp of several old ones. The chief of these—it was now a year old—was that Sir Arthur was the very most eligible and, shrewdly considered, taking one thing with another, most valuable young man in the world. There were of course a good many things he wasn’t. He wasn’t amusing; he wasn’t insinuating; he wasn’t of an absolutely irrepressible ardour. She believed he was constant, but he was certainly not eager. With these things, however, she could perfectly dispense; she had in particular quite outlived the need of being amused. She had had a very exciting life, and her vision of happiness at present was to be magnificently bored. The idea of complete and uncriticised respectability filled her soul with satisfaction; her imagination prostrated itself in the presence of this virtue. She was aware she had achieved it but ill in her own person; but she could now at least connect herself with it by sacred ties. She could prove in that way what was her deepest feeling. This was a religious appreciation of Sir Arthur’s great quality—his smooth and rounded, his blooming lily-like exemption from social flaws. She was at home when Littlemore went to see her and surrounded by several visitors to whom she was giving a late cup of tea and to whom she introduced her tall compatriot. He stayed till they dispersed, in spite of the manœuvres of a gentleman who evidently desired to outlinger him, but who, whatever might have been his happy fortune on former visits, received on this occasion no encouragement from their hostess. He looked at Littlemore slowly, beginning with his boots and travelling up as if to discover the reason of so unexpected a preference, and then, with no salutation to him, left the pair face to face. “I’m curious to see what you’ll do for me now you’ve got your sister with you,” Mrs. Headway presently remarked, having heard of this circumstance from Rupert Waterville. “I realise you’ll have to do something, you know. I’m sorry for you, but I don’t see how you can get off. You might ask me to dine some day when she’s dining out. I’d come even then, I think, because I want to keep on the right side of you.” “I call that the wrong side,” said Littlemore.