t share his
own ground for complaint! Dinner over, Lessing frequently succumbed to
an impulse which drew him towards a large corner house in a square
adjoining his flat, wherein a particularly happy family party lived, and
loved, and laughed, and extended the most cordial of welcomes to
uninvited guests.

Mr Gordon was a business man, who, having accumulated a modest "pile,"
had promptly retired from the City, and now devoted himself to the
performance of good works for the benefit of others, and the collection
of old china for the satisfaction of himself. Mrs Gordon was a matron
of the plump and complacent order, an excellent manager, who did not
know the meaning of fuss, and whose servants invariably stayed with her
for years, and then departed, laden with spoils, to espouse a local
baker or grocer, and live happily ever afterwards.

Delia, the daughter, was a minx. She was slim and tall, and had crinkly
dark eyebrows, and an oval face, and misty grey eyes with a dreamy,
faraway expression, and fringed with a double row of preposterously long
eyelashes. She looked particularly dreamy and inaccessible when young
men came in to call, and they mentally abased themselves before her,
gazing with dazzled eyes at the pinnacle on which she stood, in maiden
meditation,--exquisitely, wondrously, crystally unconscious of their own
rough existence. And all the time there was not a line of their
features, not a kink in their neckties, that that minx Delia did not see
with the minuteness of a microscope!

Terence, the son, was walking the hospitals, kept a collection of bones
in his coat pocket, and looked upon life as a huge jest organised for
his special benefit; loyally returning the compliment by playing jests
himself on every available opportunity. In holiday time, he was most
useful as a companion to the two scholars with whom he was a prime
favourite, but in term time Lessing regarded him with mitigated favour.
As a conversationalist he preferred the father; as a confidante, the
mother; where Delia was concerned he preferred a _tete-a-tete_. Terence
was a very good sort, but he was apt to be decidedly _de trop_.

On the evening of the day on which he had been made a director of his
company, Lessing took his way to the corner house, and found the amiable
quartette disporting themselves after their separate ways in the
comfortable sitting-room which was their favourite evening resort. Mr
Gordon was reading the late