unimpeachable honesty--I
mean honesty of thought, honesty of purpose--intellectual honesty. You
have no idea how rare that quality is amongst public men--or literary
men--or journalists. Indeed it is a wonder that Brooke is so successful
as he is, considering that he never wrote or said a word that he did not
mean. No doubt that seems a small thing to you: it is not a small thing
to say of a journalist now-a-days."

"I don't know much about journalists," said Lesley. "But all that you
are saying would be taken as a matter of course amongst _gentlemen_."

There was a snub for Maurice, and a sly hit at her father, too. Maurice
began to wax warm.

"Miss Brooke," he said, "you entirely fail to understand me; and I can
imagine that you, perhaps, fail to understand your father also."

"If I do," said Lesley, proudly, "I hardly need to be set right by a
stranger."

The young doctor sprang to his feet. "I a stranger!" he said. "I, who
have known and appreciated and worked with Caspar Brooke for the last
half dozen years--I to be called a stranger by his daughter? I don't
think that's fair: I don't indeed."

He paused and put his tea-cup down upon the table. "If you'll only think
for a minute, Miss Brooke," he said, entreatingly, with such a sudden
softening of voice and manner that Lesley sat amazed, "I cannot believe
but that you'll pardon me. I owe so much to your father--he has been a
guide, a helper, almost a prophet to me, ever since I came across him
when I was a medical student at King's College Hospital, and I only want
everybody to see him with my eyes--loving and reverent eyes, I can tell
you, though I wouldn't say so to everybody, seeing that love and
reverence seem to have gone out of fashion! But to his daughter----"

"His daughter surely does not need to be taught how to think of him by
another, whether he be an old friend or a comparative stranger," said
Lesley. "She can learn to know him for herself."

"But _can_ she?"--Maurice Kenyon's Irish strain, which always led him to
be more eager and explicit in speech than if he had been entirely of
Anglo-Saxon nationality, was running away with him. "Are you sure that
she can? Look here, Miss Brooke: you come to your father's house
straight from a French convent, I believe. What _can_ you know of
English life? of the strife of political parties, of literary parties,
of faiths and theories and passions? You are plunged into the midst of a
new world--it can't he