“Your poor father was of a different opinion,” said Lady Millicent drily, and with her voice lowered to the properly pathetic tone in which alone she allowed herself to speak of her dead husband. Horace turned very red at this unexpected and, as he mentally called it, indelicate remark. He was by nature an observant character, and young as he had been at the time of his father’s fatal accident, he had, without entertaining any desire to spy into peccant places, into the _rifts_, great or small, of his parents’ inner life, already seen enough with those keen eyes of his to convince him that only the outside surface of things was smooth in his stately and prosperous home. The two lads had during Cecil Vavasour’s lifetime been accustomed to hear much obsequious praise and prosternating flattery of their mother. For years they had grown up in the faith of her prudence, her large-mindedness, her liberality, and her cleverness; and it was not till long after they were fatherless that either Horace or Arthur became entirely convinced that Lady Millicent had shone with reflected lustre only, and that the good gifts for which the world had given her credit were not _hers_, but those of the husband who had borne his faculties through life with such a meek and unobtrusive grace. How far Lady Millicent was at that time aware of the fact that the eyes of not only her children but the world were opened to her shortcomings we need not now inquire. Proud and arrogant though she was, “milady” would have been very far from pleased could she have learned the truth, and known what a “falling-off was there,” where but a few short years before all tongues, both male and female, great and small, were wagging in her praise. “Please, dear mother,” Horace said, with the angry spot deepening on his brow, “to remember that my poor father’s name can never be brought in--in--this way without giving pain to all of us. I always feel that the opinions of one that is dead should be held even more sacred than those of a person who is absent. The latter _may_ come back either to uphold or to deny them, while--” “My dear Horace,” interrupted Lady Millicent haughtily, “this will never do; you will be thought--pardon me for saying so--a terrible bore in society if you take to laying down the law in this prosy way. I little thought when I asked you a simple question about your brother what I was bringing upon myself.” Horace laughed good-humouredly. Like most young men, he hated a _scene_ of any kind, and was very apt, for his sisters’ sake as well as his own, to turn off Lady Millicent’s attacks with a joke. “Thank you, ma’am, for the hint,” he said good-humouredly. “It _was_ a great mistake on my part dogmatising in such a ponderous fashion. As to your question, my dear mother, I really believe that Arthur is waiting to learn something of your wishes on the subject. As we all know, he will be twenty-one next month.”