thanking heaven that
Daisy Medland's youth postponed another distasteful necessity.

"You'll have to face it in a few months' time," said Eleanor Scaife, who
was not always as comforting a companion as a lady in her position is
supposed to be.

"Oh, they'll be out in a month," answered Lady Eynesford confidently.
"The Bishop says they can't last. Do you know, Eleanor, Mr. Coxon is the
only Churchman among them?"

"Shocking!" said Eleanor, with no more suspicion of irony than her
reputation as an _esprit fort_ demanded. It really startled her a
little: the social significance seemed considerable.

Mr. Medland's invitation to dinner caused him perhaps more perturbation
than had his invitation to power. A natural sensitiveness of mind
supplied in him the place of an experience of refined society or an
impulse of inherited pride. He cared nothing that his advent to office
alarmed and displeased many; but it gave him pain to be compelled to
dine at the table of a lady who, by notorious report, did not desire his
company.

"I don't want to go, and she doesn't want to have me," he protested to
his daughter; "yet she must have me and I must go. The great god Sham
again, Daisy."

"You'll meet him everywhere now," said Daisy, with a melancholy shake of
her young head.

"And rout him somewhere?"

"Oh yes, everywhere--except at Government House."

"I hate going."

"I believe mother would have liked it. Don't you think so, dear?"

"Perhaps. Should you?"

"I should be terribly afraid of Lady Eynesford."

"Just my feeling," said Medland, stroking his chin.

When he entered the drawing-room at Government House, and was presented
to his hostess by the Governor, on whose brow rested a little pucker of
anxiety, Lady Eynesford was talking to the Bishop and to Mr. Puttock.
Puttock had accepted the office of Minister of Trade and Customs, but
not without grumbling, for he had aspired to control the finances of the
colony as Treasurer, and considered that Medland underrated his
influence as a political leader. He was a short man, rather stout, with
large whiskers; he wore a blue ribbon in the button-hole of his
dress-coat. Lady Eynesford considered him remarkably like a grocer, and
the very quintessence of nonconformity; but he at least was indisputably
respectable, a devoted husband, and the father of a large family, behind
whose ranks he was in the habit of walking to chapel twice every Sunday.
Sometimes he preached when