"A fortune! Law bless you, Ger! I was glad to work on the port with the Kaffirs, unloading boats; and to serve in stores, and to drive cattle and pigs; anything for bread. You can't think how strange all this seems to me"--pointing to the waving crowd in the room, several of whom had gathered round, attracted by this fraternal meeting. "Aw! Surprised to see you amidst them," minced Gerald, who could not resist the little ill-natured hint, in his growing rage. "Mrs. Greatorex invited me," said Roland, his honest simplicity detecting not the undercurrent of sarcasm. "I am in Greatorex's office; I don't suppose you knew it, Gerald. They give me twenty shillings a week; and Carrick goes bail for my rigging out. I got this coat from his tailor's tonight." The crowd laughed, the Honourable roared, and Gerald Yorke was half mad. "I'd not _acknowledge_ it, at any rate, if I were you," he said, imprudently, his affectation lost in a gust of temper. "After all you were born a Yorke." "Acknowledge what, Ger?" returned Roland. "The--the--the shame of taking a common clerkship at twenty shillings a week; and all the rest of the degradation," burst forth Gerald, setting conventionality at defiance. "My uncle, Lord Carrick, warned me of this; my mother, Lady Augusta, spoke of it in a recent letter to me," he added for the benefit of the ears around. "Why, Ger, where's the use of being put out?" retorted Roland, but with no symptom of ill-humour in his good-natured tone. "I was down, and had nobody to help me. Carrick couldn't; old Dick Yorke wouldn't; Lady Augusta said she had all of you pulling at her: and so Carrick talked to Greatorex and Greatorex, and they put me into the place. The pound a week keeps me; in clover too; you should hear what I sometimes was reduced to live on at Port Natal. There was an opening for a hot-pie man down at Poplar, and the place was offered me; if I had gone into that line you might have grumbled." The ladies and gentlemen shrieked with merriment: they began to think the fine young fellow, who looked every whit as independent a man as his fastidious brother, was chaffing them all. Gerald ground his teeth and tried to get away. "You'll come and see me, old fellow?" said Roland. "I've a stunning room, bedroom and sitting-room in one, the bedstead's let out at night. It is at Mother Jones's; poor soft Jenkins's widow, you know, that we used to wot of in the days gone by." Gerald made good his escape: and when they were quiet again. Roland had leisure to look at Miss Channing. Her bent face shone like a peony, the effect of vexation and suppressed laughter. "Why, what's the matter>" he asked. "You should not say such things, Roland. It was quite out of place in a room like this." "What things?" "About yourself. It is so different, you know, from anything young men experience here." "But it is all true," returned Roland, unable to see the argument.