“Not yet. We are to go next Sunday, for the first time to the Cloistered House. I had not heard that my husband knew you, until I saw in the paper a few days ago that your home was in Hamley. Then I asked Eglington, and he told me that your family and his had been neighbours for generations.” “His father was a Quaker,” David rejoined, “but he forsook the faith.” “I did not know,” she answered, with some hesitation. There was no reason why, when she and Eglington had talked of Hamley, he should not have said his own father had once been a Quaker; yet she had dwelt so upon the fact that she herself had Quaker blood, and he had laughed so much over it, with the amusement of the superior person, that his silence on this one point struck her now with a sense of confusion. “You are going to Hamley--we shall meet there?” she continued. “To-day I should have gone, but I have business at the Foreign Office to-morrow. One needs time to learn that all ‘private interests and partial affections’ must be sacrificed to public duty.” “But you are going soon? You will be there on Sunday?” “I shall be there to-morrow night, and Sunday, and for one long week at least. Hamley is the centre of the world, the axle of the universe--you shall see. You doubt it?” he added, with a whimsical smile. “I shall dispute most of what you say, and all that you think, if you do not continue to use the Quaker ‘thee’ and ‘thou’--ungrammatical as you are so often.” “Thee is now the only person in London, or in England, with whom I use ‘thee’ and ‘thou.’ I am no longer my own master, I am a public servant, and so I must follow custom.” “It is destructive of personality. The ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ belong to you. I wonder if the people of Hamley will say ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ to me. I hope, I do hope they will.” “Thee may be sure they will. They are no respecters of persons there. They called your husband’s father Robert--his name was Robert. Friend Robert they called him, and afterwards they called him Robert Denton till he died.” “Will they call me Hylda?” she asked, with a smile. “More like they will call thee Friend Hylda; it sounds simple and strong,” he replied. “As they call Claridge Pasha Friend David,” she answered, with a smile. “David is a good name for a strong man.” “That David threw a stone from a sling and smote a giant in the forehead. The stone from this David’s sling falls into the ocean and is lost beneath the surface.” His voice had taken on a somewhat sombre tone, his eyes looked away into the distance; yet he smiled too, and a hand upon his knee suddenly closed in sympathy with an inward determination.