permissible evasion.

His countenance fell. 'I never thought of that,' he interposed, with one
hand on his moustache. 'I-- I fancied you did it out of fellow-feeling.'

'We all think of things mainly from our own point of view first,' I
answered. 'The difference is that some of us think of them from other
people's afterwards. Motives are mixed.'

He smiled. 'I didn't know my deeply venerated relative was coming here
so soon,' he went on. 'I thought she wasn't expected till next week; my
brother wrote me that she had quarrelled with her French maid, and
'twould take her full ten days to get another. I meant to clear out
before she arrived. To tell you the truth, I was going to-morrow.'

'And now you are stopping on?'

He caught my eye again.

[Illustration: CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES, HE MURMURED.]

'Circumstances alter cases,' he murmured, with meaning.

'It is hardly polite to describe one as a circumstance,' I objected.

'I meant,' he said, quickly, 'my aunt alone is one thing; my aunt with a
friend is quite another.'

'I see,' I answered. 'There is safety in numbers.'

He eyed me hard.

'Are you mediaeval or modern?' he asked.

'Modern, I hope,' I replied. Then I looked at him again. 'Oxford?'

He nodded. 'And you?' half joking.

'Cambridge,' I said, glad to catch him out. 'What college?'

'Merton. Yours?'

'Girton.'

The odd rhyme amused him. Thenceforth we were friends--'two 'Varsity
men,' he said. And indeed it does make a queer sort of link--a
freemasonry to which even women are now admitted.

At dinner and through the evening he talked a great deal to me, Lady
Georgina putting in from time to time a characteristic growl about the
_table-d'hote_ chicken--'a special breed, my dear, with eight drumsticks
apiece'--or about the inadequate lighting of the heavy German _salon_.
She was worse than ever: pungent as a rule, that evening she was grumpy.
When we retired for the night, to my great surprise, she walked into my
bedroom. She seated herself on my bed: I saw she had come to talk over
Harold.

'He will be very rich, my dear, you know. A great catch in time. He will
inherit all my brother's money.'

'Lord Kynaston's?'

'Bless the child, no. Kynaston's as poor as a church mouse with the
tithes unpaid; he has three sons of his own, and not a blessed stiver to
leave between them. How could he, poor dear idiot? Agricultural
depression; a splendid pauper. He has only the estate, and that's in