"Right you are! You're going to meet him, I take it, presently. You asked me to come out with you simply as an excuse for that purpose. Very well, then. I've got a standing invite, as you very well know, to drop in at the nine o'clock meal any Sunday evening I like. Your aunt expects me." The forefinger became emphatic. "You simply arrange for him to meet me, say, outside the Met. at ten minutes to the hower; I shall be carrying a _Lloyd's_ in my right hand. I brings him along," continued Mr. Trew exultantly; "I introduces him as a young personal friend of mine that I met on the steamer going to Clacton, year before last. Your aunt says at once that any friend of mine is a friend of her'n. You and him pretend not to know each other, but you gradually become acquainted, and your aunt asks him, at the finish, to look in again. Does that sound all right, or can you suggest a better plan?" "It's splendid," she cried. "I think," he continued, "I shall mention in the course of the evening that his father was the best friend I ever had in the world. When I was in a slight financial difficulty once, his father--your young man's father, I mean--came to my assistance. And him not well off neither. Turning-point of my life. But for that help I should, likely enough, have gone down, and down, and down." He looked at her for approval. "What's wrong with that?" "He's a gentleman!" Mr. Trew gazed for a few moments at a baby in a perambulator. "I was born in 'fifty-five, the year of the Crimea War," he said deliberately, "and if my mother had had her way, I sh'd have been christened Sebastopol, which wouldn't have been any catch to a public man like myself. If I'm spared till next year, I shall be celebrating my jubilee, and all London will be illuminated, I expect, with military troops lining the streets. But what I want to tell you, missy, is that, all that time, I've never seen any good resulting from a girl in your position of life becoming friendly with any chap who was considerably above her in regard to what we call social status. On the other hand, I've seen harm come from it." "There's going to be none in my case," she said quickly. "I know, I know! I'm perfectly sure of that. That is to say, I'm absolutely certain that is your view now. I can't quite explain what I mean to any one of your age and your sex. If I was a well-educated man"--here he took off his cap and rubbed the top of his head with the peak--"I could find words to wrop it up somehow. The long and the short of it is, you relinquish the idea. To oblige me"--persuasively--"and to gratify your aunt, who's been pretty good to you since you were a child--" "I don't forget that." "--And for your own peace of mind in the future, give it all up, and you wait a bit until you find some one belonging to your own set." "There isn't the distance between the sets there used to be," she argued.