t least been strictly obeyed."

"When will you be leaving?" Sir Joseph enquired, gracefully throwing
down his cards.

"In about three months' time, I expect."

"I am sorry, very sorry," ejaculated the baronet.

The two men walked gravely to the door.

On the threshold Lord Henry stopped, and looking methodically round the
room, pointed at last to one of the most beautiful of Sir Joseph's
Stuart cabinets.

"You also unconsciously acknowledge that there is something revolting
and intolerable about this Age, Sir Joseph," he said smiling
mischievously; "otherwise why do you use your wealth to surround
yourself both here, and as I understand at Brineweald too, with all the
treasures of art that were produced by our ancestors."

Lord Henry laughed again; his deep thoughtful eyes filled with the tears
of mirth, and he vanished from the room leaving Sir Joseph contemplating
his costly old furniture with feelings of utter bewilderment.

CHAPTER IV

Despite Sir Joseph's very careful reservations in regard to the
increase, which unsolicited he had thought fit to make in his chief
secretary's salary, Denis, who was perfectly well aware of his own
efficiency, was inclined rather to discount every feature of his
master's generous behaviour, except the covert tribute which he believed
it was intended to make to his invaluable services. He knew the business
man's instinctive reluctance to reveal his full appreciation of a
subordinate's worth, and felt he must allow for this. But, on the other
hand, in view of Sir Joseph's intimate relations with the Delarayne
household, he was unable altogether to dispel a certain lurking anxiety
concerning the baronet's very precise allusions to the question of
marriage, which it was hard to believe could have been altogether
gratuitous. This thought was disquieting.

Denis Malster, without being exactly an incurable philanderer, was
nevertheless insufficiently commonplace to contemplate marriage, in the
Pauline sense, as a necessity. He was much more disposed, at least for
the present, to regard it merely as a piquant possibility, towards which
his very attitude of indecision lent him an extra weapon of power in
his relations with the other sex.

His life, hitherto, had been enjoyable, he thought, simply because it
had been an uninterrupted preparation for marriage without the dull
certainty of a definite conclusion. To excite interest in the other sex
and envy in his own had, e