Surely you know Andrew Dean?"

"I know Andrew Dean," said Helen; and she said nothing else.

"When did you last see him?"

"Oh, about a fortnight ago."

"It was before that. He didn't tell you? Well, it's just like him, that
is; that's Andrew all over!"

"What is?"

"He's engaged to Lilian. It's the first engagement in the family, and
she's the youngest but one."

Helen shut the trunk with a snap, then opened it and shut it again. And
then she rose, smoothing her hair.

"I scarcely know Lilian," she said, coldly. "And I don't know your
mother at all. But I must call and congratulate the child. No, Andrew
Dean didn't breathe a word."

"I may tell you as a dreadful secret, Nell, that we aren't any of us in
the seventh heaven about it. Aunt Annie said yesterday: 'I don't know
that I'm so set up with it as all that, Jane' (meaning mother). We
aren't so set up with it as all that."

"Why not?"

"Oh, we aren't. I don't know why. I pretend to be, lest Lilian should
imagine I'm jealous."

It was at this point that the voice of James Ollerenshaw announced a
young man.

The remainder of that afternoon was like a bewildering dream to James
Ollerenshaw. His front room seemed to be crowded with a multitude of
peacocks, that would have been more at home under the sun of Mrs.
Prockter's lawns up at Hillport. Yet there were only three persons
present besides himself. But decidedly they were not of his world; they
were of the world that referred to him as "old Jimmy Ollerenshaw," or
briefly as "Jimmy." And he had to sit and listen to them, and even to
answer coherently when spoken to. Emanuel Prockter was brilliant. He had
put his hat on one chair and his cane across another, and he conversed
with ducal facility. The two things about him that puzzled the master of
the house were--first, why he was not, at such an hour, engaged in at
any rate the pretence of earning his living; and, second, why he did not
take his gloves off. No notion of work seemed to exist in the minds of
the three. They chattered of tennis, novels, music, and particularly of
amateur operatic societies. James acquired the information that Emanuel
was famous as a singer of songs. The topic led then naturally to James's
concertina; the talk lightly caressed James's concertina, and then
Emanuel swept it off to the afternoon tea-room of the new Midland Grand
Hotel at Manchester, where Emanuel had lately been. And that led to the
Old Oak Tree tea-house in