ng, conceited tread of the other
man. Joseph Fleming comes out well too, honest soul!"

"He is carrying a fishing-rod. They have been fishing," said Valeria.

"Not Professor Fortescue, I am certain. _He_ does not find his pleasure
in causing pain."

"This hero-worship blinds you. Depend upon it, he is not without the
primitive instinct to kill."

"There are individual exceptions to all savage instincts, or the world
would never move."

"Instinct rules the world," said Miss Du Prel. "At least it is obviously
neither reason nor the moral sense that rules it."

"Then why does it produce a Professor Fortescue now and then?"

"Possibly as a corrective."

"Or perhaps for fun," said Hadria.

CHAPTER XXIII.

"Professor Theobald, if you are able to resist the fascinations of this
old house you are made of sterner stuff than I thought."

"I can never resist fascinations, Lady Engleton."

"Do you ever try?"

"My life is spent in the endeavour."

"How foolish!" Whether this applied to the endeavour or to the remark,
did not quite appear. Lady Engleton's graceful figure leant over the
parapet.

"Do you know, Mrs. Temperley," she said in her incessantly vivacious
manner, "I have scarcely heard a serious word since our two Professors
came to us. Isn't it disgraceful? I naturally expected to be improved
and enlightened, but they are both so frivolous, I can't keep them for a
moment to any important subject. They refuse to be profound. It is _I_
who have to be profound."

"While _we_ endeavour to be charming," said Professor Theobald.

"You may think that flattering, but I confess it seems to me a beggarly
compliment (as men's to women usually are)."

"You expect too much of finite intelligence, Lady Engleton."

"This is how I am always put off! If it were not that you are both such
old friends--you are a sort of cousin I think, Professor Fortescue--I
should really feel aggrieved. One has to endure so much more from
relations. No, but really; I appeal to Mrs. Temperley. When one is
hungering for erudition, to be offered compliments! Not that I can
accuse Professor Fortescue of compliments," she added with a laugh;
"wild horses would not drag one from him. I angle vainly. But he is so
ridiculously young. He enjoys things as if he were a schoolboy. Does one
look for that in one's Professors? He talks of the country as if it were
_Paradise Regained_."

"So it is to me," he said with a smile.

"But that i