“Anything the matter, dad? All well at home, I hope?” queried Launce as he extended a hand which his father made believe not to see. “There’s a great deal the matter; more, perhaps, than you will find it easy to explain away,” responded the brewer gruffly. “Take that chair and read this.” As he spoke he took Ethel’s letter from under a paperweight at his elbow and tossed it across the table to his son. Launce read it to the end without a word. When he had done, he refolded it slowly, and then lifted his eyes and looked at his father, who was grimly watching him. “Well, sir, what have you to say for yourself?” demanded the latter. “Nothing much, except to confess that I have made a precious idiot of myself,” replied Launce with an uneasy laugh. “Now that matters have come to this pass, I need scarcely say that any questions you may choose to put to me shall be answered truthfully and to the best of my ability.” And so by degrees, and by way of answers to his father’s interrogatories, the story of Hetty Blair was told. “Your conduct has indeed been that of an idiot—no milder term is applicable to it,” remarked the brewer when he had brought his string of questions to an end. “That you have been headstrong and extravagant, I have long known—known it to my cost—but that you should have displayed such an utter lack of common sense in your dealings with this governessing girl, is what I should have found it impossible to believe had not facts, coupled with your own confession, proved to me how utterly mistaken I was. I have lost every atom of confidence in you, and from to-day——” “It does not follow, because a man has made an egregious ass of himself once, that he must necessarily do so a second time,” broke in Launce, a little sullenly. “Indeed, after the lesson I have just had read me, it would be absurd to suppose that I should ever commit myself in a similar way again.” “Not in the same way, perhaps, but in some other way equally as reprehensible. It is only wise men who profit by experience. Fools never learn. In which of the two categories do you assume to class yourself?” Launce bit his lip, but refrained from replying.