that his friend had spoken to him
quite frankly, and that he was really bent on asking Sheila to become
his wife. Ingram contemplated this prospect with some dismay, and with
some vague consciousness that he was himself responsible for what he
could not help regarding as a disaster. He had half expected that Frank
Lavender would, in his ordinary fashion, fall in love with Sheila--for
about a fortnight. He had joked him about it even before they came
within sight of Sheila's home. He had listened with a grim humor to
Lavender's outbursts of admiration, and only asked himself how many
times he had heard the same phrases before. But now things were looking
more serious, for the young man had thrown himself into the prosecution
of his new project with all the generous poetic enthusiasm of a highly
impulsive nature. Ingram saw that everything a young man could do to win
the heart of a young girl Lavender would do; and Nature had dowered him
richly with various means of fascination. Most dangerous of all of these
was a gift of sincerity that deceived himself. He could assume an
opinion or express an emotion at will, with such a genuine fervor that
he himself forgot how recently he had acquired it, and was able to
convince his companion for the moment that it was a revelation of his
inmost soul. It was this charm of impetuous sincerity which had
fascinated Ingram himself years before, and made him cultivate the
acquaintance of a young man whom he at first regarded as a somewhat
facile, talkative and histrionic person. Ingram perceived, for example,
that young Lavender had so little regard for public affairs that he
would have been quite content to see our Indian empire go for the sake
of eliciting a sarcasm from Lord Westbury; but at the same time, if you
had appealed to his nobler instincts, and placed before him the
condition of a certain populace suffering from starvation, he would have
done all in his power to aid them: he would have written letters to the
newspapers, would have headed subscriptions, and would have ended by
believing that he had been the constant friend of the people of India
throughout his life, and was bound to stick to them to the end of it.

As often as not he borrowed his fancies and opinions from Edward Ingram
himself, who was amused and gratified at the same time to find his
humdrum notions receive a dozen new lights and colors when transferred
to the warmer atmosphere of his friend's imagination. I