to dress for dinner, anyhow. Good-bye!" Her
ladyship held out a decisive hand, that said:--"Curtain."

But Sir Hamilton did not seem so sure the performance was over. "Half a
minute more, L-Lady Ancester," said he; and he again half-stumbled over
her name. "I am rather slow in expressing myself, but I have something I
want to say."

"I am not in a hurry."

"I can only do exactly what you have asked me to do--place the case
before my son as you have placed it before me."

"I have not asked for anything else."

"Well, then, I can do that, after I have talked over it with his mother.
But I can't ... I can't undertake to _influence_ him."

"Is he so intractable?... However, young men _are_."

"I did not mean that. I ... I don't exactly know how to say it...."

"Why should you hesitate to say what you were going to say?... Do you
suppose I don't know what it was?" For he had begun to anticipate it
with some weakening reservation. "I could tell you exactly. You were
going to say, was it right to influence young people's futures and so
on, and wasn't it taking a great responsibility, and so on? Now, were
you not?"

"I had some such thought."

"Exactly. You mean you thought what I said you thought."

"And you think me mistaken?"

"Not always. In the present case, yes--if you consider that it would be
influencing. I don't. It would only be refraining from keeping silence
about--about something it may never occur to your son to think
possible." It may have struck her hearer that to call shouting a fact on
the house-tops "refraining from keeping silence" about it was straining
phraseology; but it was not easy to formulate the idea, offhand. It was
easier to hold his tongue. The Countess might have done better to hold
hers, at this point. But she must needs be discriminating, to show how
clear-sighted she was. "Of course, it is quite a different thing to try
to bring about a marriage. That is certainly taking a grave
responsibility." She stopped with a jerk, for she caught herself
denouncing the very course of action which well-meaning friends had
adopted successfully in the case of herself and her husband. If it had
not been for the jerk, Sir Hamilton would not have known the comparison
that was passing in her mind. She recovered herself to continue:--"Of
course, trying to bring about a marriage is a grave responsibility, but
mere testing of the strength of links that bind may be no more than bare
prudence. A break