im, my dear, you don't know! He is beating them all,
as he always did! At the school, at the university, he was always the
best! He used to get what they call firsts and double firsts every
week!'

Margaret could not help laughing, and even Lushington smiled in his
agony.

'It was splendid,' said the young girl, looking at him. 'Did you really
get a double first?'

Lushington nodded.

'One?' screamed Madame Bonanni. 'Twenty, I tell you! A hundred----'

'No, no, mother,' interrupted Lushington. No one can get more than
one.'

'Ah, did I not tell you?' cried the prima donna, triumphantly. There is
only one, and he got it! What did I tell you? How can you expect me not
to be proud of him?'

'You ought to be,' answered Margaret, very much in earnest, and for the
first time Lushington saw in her eyes the light of absolutely
unreserved admiration.

It was not for the double first at Oxford that she gave it. There had
been a moment when it had hurt her to think that he probably accepted a
good deal of luxury in his existence out of his mother's abundant
fortune, but it was gone now. Even as a schoolboy he had guessed whence
at least a part of that wealth really came, and had refused to touch a
penny of it. But Lushington felt as if he were being combed with
red-hot needles from head to foot, and the perspiration stood on his
forehead. It would have filled him with shame to mop it with his
handkerchief and yet he felt that in another moment it would run down.
The awful circumstances of his dream came vividly back to him, and he
could positively hear Margaret telling him that he looked hot, so loud
that the whole house could understand what she said. But at this point
something almost worse happened.

Madame Bonanni's motherly but eagle eye detected the tiny beads on his
brow. With a cry of distress she sprang to her feet and began to wipe
them away with the corner of her napkin that was tied round her neck,
talking all the time.

'My darling!' she cried. 'I always forget that you feel hot when I feel
cold! Angelo, open everything--the windows, the doors! Why do you stand
there like a dressed-up doll in a tailor's window? Don't you see that
he is going to have a fit?'

'Mother, mother! Please don't!' protested the unfortunate Lushington,
who was now as red as a beet.

But Madame Bonanni took the lower end of her napkin by the corners, as
if it had been an apron, and fanned him furiously, though he put up his
ha