ginning, and attack me?'

'I don't know how to point my guns.'

'Why? Do you think me such a hard case?'

He hesitated, and said 'Yes.'

'Why?' she asked again, with a mixture of mortification and curiosity.

'Your defences have withstood all I have been able to bring to bear in
the shape of ordnance.'

'Why do you say that? I have been very much interested in all I have
heard you say.'

'I know that; and not in the least moved.'

Betty was vexed. Had her tactics failed so utterly? Did Pitt think she
was a person quite and irremediably out of his plane, and inaccessible
to the interests which he ranked first of all? She had wanted to get
nearer to him. Had she so failed? She would not let the tears come into
her eyes, but they were ready, if she would have let them.

'So you give me up!' she said.

'I have no alternative.'

'You have lost all hope of me?'

'No. But at present your eyes are so set in another direction that you
will not look the way I have been pointing you. Of course, you do not
see what I see.'

'In what direction are my eyes so set?'

'I will not presume to tell Miss Frere what she knows so much better
than I do.'

Betty bit her lip.

'What is in that cabinet?' she asked suddenly.

'Coins.'

'Oh, coins! I never could see the least attractiveness in coins.'

'That was because--like some other things--they were not looked at.'

'Well, what _is_ the interest of them?'

'To find out, I am afraid you must give them your attention. They are
like witnesses, stepping out from the darkness of the past and telling
the history of it--history in which they moved and had a part, you
understand.'

'But the history of the past is not so delightful, is it, that one
would care much about hearing the witnesses? What is in that other
cabinet, where you are standing?'

'That contains my herbarium.'

'All that? You don't mean that all those drawers are filled with dried
flowers?'

'Pretty well filled. There is room for some more.'

'How you must have worked!'

'That was play.'

'Then what do you call work?'

'Well, reading law rather comes into that category.'

'You expect to go on reading law?'

'For the present. I approve of finishing things when they are begun.'

'Mr. Dallas, what are you going to _do?_ In what, after all, are you
going to be unlike other men? Your mother seems to apprehend some
disastrous and mysterious change in all your prospects; I cannot see
the necessit