ed. 'I ought to have
written. I'm very sorry that I didn't, and I've come down purposely to
explain it all.'

'Well,' said his father, 'better late than never. What kind is she like,
lad?'

'Well,' said Paul, 'you can't expect a man to describe the girl he's in
love with so as to satisfy anybody else She's slight and not very tall;
she has brown hair and brown eyes; she has a very pretty voice, and very
dainty ways.'

'Ay, ay, lad!' said Armstrong; 'but her soul--her intelligence?'

'She's bright and clever,' Paul cried, rather protestingly. 'She takes a
keen interest in my work. We're dearly attached to each other, and I am
looking forward to a happy life.'

'What like are her people?' Armstrong asked.

'Well, I don't know a great deal about her people. She's an orphan. She
has an elder sister, and an aunt and an uncle or two.'

'She'll be a Catholic, will she?'

'No,' said Paul; 'her family is Huguenot. I think I should rather have
shrunk from marrying a Catholic. There's a sort of prejudice of which it
isn't easy to free the mind.'

He was sinking clean out of sight of his own esteem; but it was his sole
business for the time being to save his father as far as possible, and
he had grown reckless of himself.

'She shall come to see you,' he went on, 'and you wont be able to help
making friends with her. I've to be back in Montcourtois to-morrow
night, or she'll be worrying her life out. That means I must catch the
one o'clock express for town, and that, again, means that I've only four
hours to spend at home this time.'

'Ye'll have a glass of whisky, Paul?'

'I will, sir,' Paul answered, 'with all the pleasure in life.'

So Armstrong went to the cupboard and brought out a bottle and the sugar
basin, and set the kettle on the fire, and then sat down and loaded up
his pipe in silence.

'There's much I'd like to say, Paul,' he began at length.

There was nothing in the act which could have moved a stranger to
anything but a smile at the oddity of it, but it touched Paul almost to
tears when the gray old man lugged out of his coat-tail pocket a whole
newspaper, and having pinched from it a most economical fragment, singed
his fingers at the bars in the act of lighting it. He had laughed at
that little quaintness a hundred times as a lad, and it was somehow the
first thing that had come home to him as a real reminder to be in want
of reformation.'

They grew more at ease. Armstrong took up the subject