!
Well, George, here I am! Have you thought of some thing new for me to
see?" She glanced at Miss Vance, well pleased that she should see the
lad's foolish fondness for her.

George forced a smile. He looked worn and jaded. Miss Vance noticed
that his usually neat cravat was awry and his hands were gloveless.
"Yes," he said. "It is a little church. The oldest in London. I want
to show it to you."

Miss Vance tied on Mrs. Waldeaux's bonnet, smoothing her hair
affectionately. "There are too many gray hairs here for your age,
Frances," she said. "George, you should keep your mother from worry
and work. Don't let her hair grow gray so soon."

George bowed. "I hope I shall do my duty," he said, with dignity.
"Come, mother."

As they drove down Piccadilly Mrs. Waldeaux chattered eagerly to her
son. She could not pour out her teeming fancies about this new world
to any body else, but she could not talk fast enough to him. Had they
not both been waiting for a lifetime to see this London?

"The thing," she said earnestly, as she settled herself beside him,
"the thing that has impressed me most, I think, were those great
Ninevite gods yesterday. I sat for hours before them while you were
gone. There they sit, their hands on their knees, and stare out of
their awful silence at the London fog, just as they stared at the
desert before Christ was born. I felt so miserably young and sham!"

George adjusted his cravat impatiently. "I'm afraid I don't quite
follow you, mother. These little flights of yours---- They belong to
your generation, I suppose. It was a more sentimental one than mine.
You are not very young. And you certainly are not a sham. The statues
are interesting, but I fail to see why they should have had such an
effect upon you."

"Oh!" said Frances. "But you did not stay alone with them as long as I
did, or you would have felt it too. Now I am sure that the debates in
Parliament impressed you just as they did me?"

George said nothing, but she went on eagerly. It never occurred to her
that he could be bored by her impressions in these greatest days of her
life. "To see a half-dozen well-groomed young men settle the affairs
of India and Australia in a short, indifferent colloquy! How shy and
awkward they were, too! They actually stuttered out their sentences in
their fear of posing or seeming pretentious. So English! Don't you
think it was very English, George?"

"I really did no