he seeing and listening to her like sitting under
the silvery canopy of a fountain in high Summer?'

'All the comparisons are yours,' Arthur said enviously.

'Mr. Rhodes, you are a poet, I believe, and all you require to loosen
your tongue is a drop of Bacchus, so if you will do me the extreme honour
to dine with me at my Club this evening, we'll resume the toast that
should never be uttered dry. You reprove me justly, my friend.'

Arthur laughed and accepted. The Club was named, and the hour, and some
items of the little dinner: the birds and the year of the wines.

It surprised him to meet Mr. Redworth at the table of his host. A greater
surprise was the partial thaw in Redworth's bearing toward him. But, as
it was partial, and he a youth and poor, not even the genial influences
of Bacchus could lift him to loosen his tongue under the repressing
presence of the man he knew to be his censor, though Sullivan Smith
encouraged him with praises and opportunities. He thought of the many
occasions when Mrs. Warwick's art of management had produced a tacit
harmony between them. She had no peer. The dinner failed of the pleasure
he had expected from it. Redworth's bluntness killed the flying
metaphors, and at the end of the entertainment he and Sullivan Smith were
drumming upon politics.

'Fancies he has the key of the Irish difficulty!' said the latter,
clapping hand on his shoulder, by way of blessing, as they parted at the
Club-steps.

Redworth asked Arthur Rhodes the way he was going, and walked beside him.

'I suppose you take exercise; don't get colds and that kind of thing,' he
remarked in the old bullying fashion; and changed it abruptly. 'I am glad
to have met you this evening. I hope you'll dine with me one day next
week. Have you seen Mrs. Warwick lately?'

'She is unwell; she has been working too hard,' said Arthur.

'Seriously unwell, do you mean?'

'Lady Dunstane is at her house, and speaks of her recovering.'

'Ah. You've not seen her?'

'Not yet.'

'Well, good-night.'

Redworth left him, and only when moved by gratitude to the lad for his
mention of Mrs. Warwick's 'working too hard,' as the cause of her
illness, recollected the promised dinner and the need for having his
address.

He had met Sullivan Smith accidentally in the morning and accepted the
invitation to meet young Rhodes, because these two, of all men living,
were for the moment dearest to him, as Diana Warwick's true and simple
ch