look with
soft eyes.

"What I really care about now is the spirit of the educated class.
There's such a great deal to be done among people of our own kind. Not
of course by direct teaching and preaching, but by personal influence,
exercised in all sorts of ways. I should like to set the intellectual
tone in my own circle. I should like my house to--as it were, to
radiate light."

The listener could not but smile. Yet his amusement had no tincture of
irony. He himself would not have used these phrases, but was not the
thought exactly what he had in mind? He, too, felt his inaptitude for
the ordinary forms of "social" usefulness; in his desire and his
resolve to "do something," he had been imagining just this sort of
endeavour, and May's words seemed to make it less vague.

"I quite understand you," he exclaimed, with some fervour. "There's
plenty of scope for that sort of influence. You would do your best to
oppose the tendencies of vulgar and selfish society. If only in a
little circle one could set the fashion of thought, of living for
things that are worth while! And I see no impossibility. It has been
done before now."

"I'm very glad you like the idea," said May, graciously. Again--without
looking at him--she saw his lips shaping words which they could not
sound; she saw his troubled, abashed smile, and his uneasy movement
which ended in nothing at all.

"We have some fine trees at Rivenoak," fell from her, as her eyes
wandered.

"Indeed you have!"

"You like trees, don't you?"

"Very much. When I was a boy, I once saw a great many splendid oaks and
beeches cut down, and it made me miserable."

"Where was that?"

"On land that had belonged to my father, and, which, for a year or two,
belonged to me."

He spoke with an uneasy smile, again crushing a brown leaf between his
fingers. May's silence compelled him to proceed.

"I have no trees now." He tried to laugh. "Only a bit of a farm, which
seems to be going out of cultivation."

"But why do you let it do so?"

"It's in the hands of a troublesome tenant. If I had been wise, I
should have learnt to farm it myself, years ago. Perhaps I shall still
do so."

"That would be interesting," said May. "Tell me about it, will you?
It's in Kent, I think?"

The impoverished peer spoke freely of the matter. He had been seeking
this opportunity since the beginning of their talk. Yet, before he had
ceased, moral discomfort took hold upon him, and his head dr