ut me!"

"William!--be a bear if you like, but not an idiot!"

"Perfectly true," he declared; "not the dazzlers and the high-fliers,
anyway--the only ones it would be an excitement to carry off."

"You know very well," she said, slowly, "that now you might marry
anybody."

He threw his head back rather haughtily.

"Oh! I wasn't thinking about money, and that kind of thing. Well, give
me time, mother--don't hurry me! And now I'd better stop talking
nonsense, change my clothes, and be off. Good-bye, dear--you shall hear
when the job's perpetrated!"

"William, really!--don't say these things--at least to anybody but me.
You understand very well"--she drew herself up rather finely--"that if I
hadn't known, in spite of your apparent idleness, you would do any work
they <i>set</i> you to do, to your own credit and the country's, I'd never
have lifted a finger for you!"

William Ashe laughed out.

"Oh! intriguing mother!" he said, stooping again to kiss her. "So you
admit you did it?"

He went off gayly, and she heard him flying up-stairs three steps at a
time, as though he were still an untamed Eton boy, and there were no
three weeks' hard political fighting behind him, and no interview which
might decide his life before him.

He entered his own sitting-room on the second floor, shut the door
behind him, and glanced round him with delight. It was a large room
looking on a side street, and obliquely to the park. Its walls were
covered with books--books which almost at first sight betrayed to the
accustomed eye that they were the familiar companions of a student.
Almost every volume had long paper slips inside it, and when opened
would have been found to contain notes and underlinings in a somewhat
reckless and destructive abundance. A large table, also loaded untidily
with books and papers, stood in the centre of the room; many of them
were note-books, stored with evidences of the most laborious and patient
work; a Cambridge text lay beside them face downward, as he had left it
on departure. His mother's housekeeper, who had been one of his best
friends from babyhood, was the only person allowed to dust his room--but
on the strict condition that she replaced everything as she found it.

He took up the volume, and plunged a moment headlong into the Greek
chorus that met his eye. "<i>Jolly!</i>" he said, putting it down with a sigh
of regret. "These beastly politics!"

And he went muttering to his dressing-room, s