The door was thrown open, and Mrs. Lashmar's voice broke upon the still
air of the study.

"Dyce, have you seen to-day's _Times_? There's a most interesting
article on the probable duration of Parliament. Take it up to your room
with you, and read it before you sleep."

CHAPTER XIX

"There's a letter for you, Dyce; forwarded from Rivenoak, I see."

It lay beside his plate on the breakfast table, and Dyce eyed it with
curiosity. The backward-sloping hand was quite unknown to him. He
tapped at an egg, and still scrutinised the writing on the envelope; it
was Constance who had crossed out the Rivenoak address, and had written
beside it "The Vicarage, Alverholme."

"Have you slept well?" asked his mother, who treated him with much more
consideration than at his last visit.

"Very well indeed," he replied mechanically, taking up his letter and
cutting it open with a table-knife.

"HAVE MORE COURAGE. AIM HIGHER. IT IS NOT TOO LATE."

Dyce stared at the oracular message, written in capitals on a sheet of
paper which contained nothing else. He again examined the envelope, but
the post-mark in no way helped him. He glanced at his mother, and,
finding her eye upon him, folded the sheet carelessly. He glanced at
his father, who had just laid down a letter which evidently worried
him. The meal passed with very little conversation. Dyce puzzled over
the anonymous counsel so mysteriously conveyed to him, and presently
went apart to muse unobserved.

He thought of Iris Woolstan. Of course a woman had done this thing, and
Iris he could well believe capable of it. But what did she mean? Did
she really imagine that, but for lack of courage, he would have made
suit to _her_? Did she really regard herself as socially his superior?
There was no telling. Women had the oddest notions on such subjects,
and perhaps the fact of his engaging himself to Constance Bride, a mere
secretary, struck her as deplorable. "Aim higher." The exhortation was
amusing enough. One would have supposed it came at least from some
great heiress--

He stopped in his pacing about the garden. An heiress?--May Tomalin?

Shaking of the head dismissed this fancy. Miss Tomalin was a
matter-of-fact young person; he could not see her doing such a thing as
this. And yet--and yet--when he remembered their last talk, was it not
conceivable that he had made a deeper impression upon her than, in his
modesty, he allowed himself to suppose? Had she not spok