Archie brought several of his friends in their cricketting clothes up to the carriage to see his sister, and to be introduced to papaw. Poor Archie could not make up his mind to abandon that “papaw.” “Father” seemed almost disrespectful to so great a personage as the rich Rowland, the great engineer. He was very anxious, however, to explain, _sotto voce_, that several of the young men in their flannels who gathered round Marion, and to whom she dispensed smiles and small jokes, like a Duchess at Lord’s, were “students,” a description which slightly mollified Rowland. Students were better than shop-boys, which was what Archie himself was painfully like. Never had Mr. Rowland encountered a harder piece of work in his life than to smile and tolerate the small talk of his children and their friends. He could not help comparing them to the people he had been accustomed to in late years,--people, he said vehemently to himself, perhaps not worth half so much! These lads, if they were students, were probably maintaining themselves, living like Spartans, not to draw upon the limited resources at home. How much nobler and finer than the young officers and civilians he had been in the habit of seeing in that same guise, yet how different! That he, a man of the people himself, should so see the difference; that he should be so pained by it, and by the fact that his son was at home in the one strata of company, and would be quite out of the other! How painful, how miserable, how ridiculous, how wrong altogether it was! He exerted himself to talk to some of them, and said angrily to himself that they were much more conversible than the subalterns, at whom he would have thrown a jibe, whom he would not have taken the trouble to talk to! But what of that? Archie swaggered about the ground proud and inwardly uplifted because of the carriage, the pair of horses, the pretty sister, and papaw. Had he dared to ask them all to Rosmore, where they might see the family in their glory, his cup of triumph would have been full; but he did not quite venture upon such a strong step as that.