udent grew to be Lord Chancellor, and the bookseller remained a
book-seller; in the realm of actual values, the Thorpes were as good as
the Plowdens.

A customer came out of the shop, and Thorpe went in, squeezing his way
along the narrow passage between the tall rows of books, to the small
open space at the end. His sister stood here, momentarily occupied at a
high desk. She did not look up.

"Well--I visited his Lordship all right." He announced his presence thus
genially.

"I hope you're the better for it," she remarked, turning to him, after a
pause, her emotionless, plain face.

"Oh, immensely," he affirmed, with robust jocularity. "You should have
seen the way they took to me. It was 'Mr. Thorpe' here and 'Mr. Thorpe'
there, all over the place. Ladies of title, mind you--all to myself at
breakfast two days running. And such ladies--finer than silk. Oh, it's
clear as daylight--I was intended for a fashionable career."

She smiled in a faint, passive way. "Well--they say 'better late
than never,' you know." "And after all, IS it so very late?" he said,
adopting her phrase as an expression of his thought. "I'm just turned
forty, and I feel like a boy. I was looking at that 'Peerage' there,
the other day--and do you know, I'm sixteen years younger than the first
Lord Plowden was when they made him a peer? Why he didn't even get into
the House of Commons until he was seven-and-forty."

"You seem to have the Plowden family on the brain," she commented.

"I might have worse things. You've no idea, Lou, how nice it all is. The
mother, Lady Plowden--why she made me feel as if I was at the very
least a nephew of hers. And so simple and natural! She smiled at me,
and listened to me, and said friendly things to me--why, just as anybody
might have done. You'll just love her, when you know her."

Louisa laughed in his face. "Don't be a fool, Joel," she adjured him,
with a flash of scornful mirth. He mingled a certain frowning impatience
with the buoyancy of his smile. "Why, of course, you'll know her," he
protested. "What nonsense you're thinking of! Do you suppose I'm going
to allow you to mess about here with second-hand almanacs, and a sign in
your window of 'threepence in the shilling discount for cash,' while I'm
a millionaire? It's too foolish, Lou. You annoy me by supposing such a
thing!"

"There's no good talking about it at all," she observed, after a little
pause. "It hasn't come off yet, for one thing. And