es of the Abbey, the
long decorated facade and towers of the Houses of Parliament, stood out
ghostly and livid in a gleam of frail, unrelated sunshine against the
murk of the smoky sky.

"I should have supposed Sir Richard Calmady was steady," Lady Louisa
remarked, inconsequently and rather stiffly. Ludovic really was
exasperating.

"Steady? Oh! perfectly. Poor, dear chap, he hasn't had much chance of
being anything else as yet."

"Still, of course, Lady Calmady would prefer his being settled. Clearly
it would be much better in every way. All things considered, he is
certainly one of the people who should marry young. And Connie would be
an excellent marriage for him, excellent--thoroughly suitable, better,
really, than on the face of it he could hope for. Ludovic, just look
out please and see if the carriage is here. Pocock always loses her
head at a terminus, and misses the men-servants. Yes, there is
Frederic--with his back to the train, looking the wrong way, of course.
He really is too stupid."

Mr. Quayle, however, succeeded in attracting the footman's attention,
and, assisted by that functionary and the lean and anxious Pocock--her
arms full of bags and umbrellas--conveyed his sister out of the railway
carriage and into the waiting brougham. She graciously offered to put
him down at his rooms, in St. James's Place, on her way to the Barking
mansion in Albert Gate, but the young man declined that honour.

"Good-bye, Louisa," he said, leaning his elbows on the open window of
the brougham and thereby presenting the back view of an irreproachably
cut overcoat and trousers to the passers-by. "I have to thank you for a
most interesting and instructive journey. Your efforts to secure the
prosperity of the family are wholly praiseworthy. I commend them. I
have a profound respect for your generalship. Still, pauper though I
am, I am willing to lay you a hundred to one in golden guineas that you
will never square papa."

Subsequently the young man bestowed himself in a hansom, and rattled
away in the wake of the Barking equipage down the objectionably steep
hill which leads from the roar and turmoil of the station into the
Waterloo Bridge road.

"I might have offered heavier odds," he said to himself, "for never,
never will she square papa."

And, not without a light sense of shame, he was conscious that he made
this reflection with a measure of relief.

CHAPTER XI

CONTAINING SAMPLES BOTH OF EARTHLY AN