a chartered accountant; but another letter from the solicitor
explained that the growth of modern businesses and the increase of
companies had led to the formation of many firms of accountants to examine
the books and put into the financial affairs of their clients an order
which old-fashioned methods had lacked. Some years before a Royal Charter
had been obtained, and the profession was becoming every year more
respectable, lucrative, and important. The chartered accountants whom
Albert Nixon had employed for thirty years happened to have a vacancy for
an articled pupil, and would take Philip for a fee of three hundred
pounds. Half of this would be returned during the five years the articles
lasted in the form of salary. The prospect was not exciting, but Philip
felt that he must decide on something, and the thought of living in London
over-balanced the slight shrinking he felt. The Vicar of Blackstable wrote
to ask Mr. Nixon whether it was a profession suited to a gentleman; and
Mr. Nixon replied that, since the Charter, men were going into it who had
been to public schools and a university; moreover, if Philip disliked the
work and after a year wished to leave, Herbert Carter, for that was the
accountant's name, would return half the money paid for the articles. This
settled it, and it was arranged that Philip should start work on the
fifteenth of September.

"I have a full month before me," said Philip.

"And then you go to freedom and I to bondage," returned Miss Wilkinson.

Her holidays were to last six weeks, and she would be leaving Blackstable
only a day or two before Philip.

"I wonder if we shall ever meet again," she said.

"I don't know why not."

"Oh, don't speak in that practical way. I never knew anyone so
unsentimental."

Philip reddened. He was afraid that Miss Wilkinson would think him a
milksop: after all she was a young woman, sometimes quite pretty, and he
was getting on for twenty; it was absurd that they should talk of nothing
but art and literature. He ought to make love to her. They had talked a
good deal of love. There was the art-student in the Rue Breda, and then
there was the painter in whose family she had lived so long in Paris: he
had asked her to sit for him, and had started to make love to her so
violently that she was forced to invent excuses not to sit to him again.
It was clear enough that Miss Wilkinson was used to attentions of that
sort. She looked very nice now in a large