"Well, what did you think of it, Lester?" The other smiled good-humoredly. "Capital! Everybody must make a beginning. He's taken a lot of pains." "It's a beastly audience!" said Sir Wilfrid Bury, in reply. "Don't I know it! Well, I'm off to congratulate. How does the catalogue get on?" "Oh, very well. I sha'n't finish till the summer. There's a good deal still to do at Coryston. Some of the things are really too precious to move about." "How do you get on with her ladyship?" asked the old man, gaily, lowering his voice. The young man smiled discreetly. "Oh, very well. I don't see very much of her." "I suppose she's pressed you into the service--makes you help Arthur?" "I looked out a few things for his speech to-day. But he has his own secretary." "You're not staying for the rest of the debate?" "No, I'm going back to St. James's Square. I have a heap of arrears to get through." "Do they put you up there? I know it's a huge house." "Yes. I have a bedroom and sitting-room there when I want them, and my own arrangements." "Ta-ta." Sir Wilfrid nodded pleasantly, and vanished into a side passage leading to the Ladies' Gallery. The young man, Reginald Lester, to whom he had been chatting, was in some sort a protégé of his own. It was Sir Wilfrid, indeed, who had introduced him, immediately after he had won an Oxford historical fellowship, to Lady Coryston, as librarian, for the highly paid work of cataloguing a superb collection of MSS. belonging to the Corystons. A generation earlier, Lester's father had been a brother officer of Sir Wilfrid's, in days when the Lester family was still rich, and before the crashing failure of the great banking-house of the name.