“Ask her what _she_ owes to advertisements, Johnny?” I said rudely; but her mockery of him annoyed me. He looked all agape. “Everything, Mr Dando,” said the girl sweetly. “My grandfather made all _his_ money out of a pill. What benefactors to the human race we both come of.” His lordship picked up a late clue. “Pills, pills!” said he; “and a hair-wash! Tell me the man in the world who wouldn’t rather have a crop of hair on his head than a crop of wisdom _in_ it, and hold a pill that settled his liver a better thing than salvation.” He stopped, and looked across at his wife, with a sudden comical tongue in his cheek. That was a bit of the old Adam slipped out. But Lady Skene did not appear to have heard him. “I hold old Jack Christmas amongst the archangels,” said his lordship. “You hear, Miss Christmas?” I said. “There’s a pedigree for you!” She did not take the least notice of me. As I walked down with Johnny to the lodge by-and-by, the little man seemed depressed--or, at least, alternately depressed and elated, with the balance running to the down mood. I could see how it went with him. He was in love. It was _veni, vidi, victus sum_, with a vengeance. It had become hard for him, and all in an unexpected moment, to reconcile his attraction to the Evercreech ménage with his loyal duty to me. He could not guess, of course, how I rather welcomed the difficulty. It tied him in a manner by the leg, and narrowed the issues of his friendly ardour. I knocked him up a bed somehow later on, for I had insisted on his being my guest for the night--and we sat and talked into the small hours. I had to go a journey on the morrow--that was inevitable; but I refrained from even hinting its direction to him. Let sleeping Johnnies lie, I thought. It was arranged that we should walk into Footover together, and there part for the time being, I to go to London, he to remain in the neighbourhood, and “keep an eye on my interests.” I trusted to that compromise for safety. “My interests,” I had a shrewd idea, would be found to gravitate largely about the person of Miss Christmas; and why should I grudge him that fiction? The two would make a very good match. He had sat silent for a long time, when he suddenly looked up with a sigh. “O! it’s hard, Dick, it’s hard,” he said, “to be born to ‘Grafto’ and an unromantic figger!” For the first time in my knowledge of him, I noticed that the perennial smile had withered from his face. CHAPTER XIV. TWO INTERVIEWS AND A DISCOVERY