you are always
preaching against it. Well, has the young lady given her consent?"

"No, I have not spoken to her. I meant to do so this morning, but she
has slipped off somewhere, with Vernon, I suppose."

Mr. Haswell whistled again, but on a new note.

"Pray do stop that noise," said Sir Robert; "it gets upon my nerves,
which are shaky this morning. Listen: It is a curious thing, one less
to be understood even than the coincidence of the Yellow God, but at
my present age of forty-four, for the first time in my life I have
committed the folly of what is called falling in love. It is not the
case of a successful, middle-aged man wishing to _ranger_ himself and
settle down with a desirable _partie_, but of sheer, stark infatuation.
I adore Barbara; the worse she treats me the more I adore her. I had
rather that the Sahara flotation should fail than that she should refuse
me. I would rather lose three-quarters of my fortune than lose her. Do
you understand?"

His partner looked at him, pursed up his lips to whistle, then
remembered and shook his head instead.

"No," he answered. "Barbara is a nice girl, but I should not have
imagined her capable of inspiring such sentiments in a man almost old
enough to be her father. I think that you are the victim of a kind of
mania, which I have heard of but never experienced. Venus--or is it
Cupid?--has netted you, my dear Aylward."

"Oh! pray leave gods and goddesses out of it, we have had enough of them
already," he answered, exasperated. "That is my case at any rate, and
what I want to know now is if I have your support in my suit. Remember,
I have something to offer, Haswell, for instance, a large fortune of
which I will settle half--it is a good thing to do in our business,--and
a baronetcy that will be a peerage before long."

"A peerage! Have you squared that?"

"I think so. There will be a General Election within the next three
months, and on such occasions a couple of hundred thousand in cool cash
come in useful to a Party that is short of ready money. I think I may
say that it is settled. She will be the Lady Aylward, or any other name
she may fancy, and one of the richest women in England. Now have I your
support?"

"Yes, my dear friend, why not, though Barbara does not want money, for
she has plenty of her own, in first-class securities that I could never
persuade her to vary, for she is shrewd in that way and steadily refuses
to sign anything. Also she will pro