ng Mavering to
go any farther?"

"Oh!" said Pasmer, "I thought you had been looking after that." He had
in fact relegated that to the company of the great questions exterior to
his personal comfort which she always decided.

"I have been looking after it, but now the time has come when you must,
as a father, take some interest in it."

Pasmer's noble mask of a face, from the point of his full white beard to
his fine forehead, crossed by his impressive black eyebrows, expressed
all the dignified concern which a father ought to feel in such an
affair; but what he was really feeling was a grave reluctance to have to
intervene in any way. "What do you want me to say to him?" he asked.

"Why, I don't know that he's going to ask you anything. I don't know
whether he's said anything to Alice yet," said Mrs. Pasmer, with some
exasperation.

Her husband was silent, but his silence insinuated a degree of wonder
that she should approach him prematurely on such a point.

"They have been thrown together all day, and there is no use to conceal
from ourselves that they are very much taken with each other?"

"I thought," Pasmer said, "that you said that from the beginning. Didn't
you want them to be taken with each other?"

"That is what you are to decide."

Pasmer silently refused to assume the responsibility.

"Well?" demanded his wife, after waiting for him to speak.

"Well what?"

"What do you decide?"

"What is the use of deciding a thing when it is all over?"

"It isn't over at all. It can be broken off at any moment."

"Well, break it off, then, if you like."

Mrs. Pasmer resumed the responsibility with a sigh. She felt the burden,
the penalty, of power, after having so long enjoyed its sweets, and she
would willingly have abdicated the sovereignty which she had spent her
whole married life in establishing. But there was no one to take it up.
"No, I shall not break it off," she said resentfully; "I shall let it go
on." Then seeing that her husband was not shaken by her threat from his
long-confirmed subjection, she added: "It isn't an ideal affair, but I
think it will be a very good thing for Alice. He is not what I expected,
but he is thoroughly nice, and I should think his family was nice. I've
been talking with Mr. Munt about them to-day, and he confirms all
that Etta Saintsbury said. I don't think there can be any doubt of his
intentions in coming here. He isn't a particularly artless young man,
but he's