“Not approve!” cried the young fellow, eagerly; “she has made me promise that I will give nothing up, that I will refuse all Mr. Bevington has arranged for me. You can’t tell how inspiring our misery is. And our courage,—a young Froissart must be our chronicler, sir. We take our sorrows gladly.”
“And may I ask——”
“Anything, anything,” interrupted the young man, gayly. “I’m sent here to be talked out of what they may call my folly. You see I can’t be talked out of it. Don’t that prove that it is no folly?”
“You seem,” said Maskelyne, dryly, “to have settled it between you—you and she.”
“Settled it! We did not need help about that. It’s the unsettling. There comes a time when friends are the worst enemies. You know that, Mr. Maskelyne?”
The old lawyer paused. “Indeed I do,” he said at last, and the sneer stealing over the outlines of his face slunk away before the look of regret that came swiftly on. Almost in embarrassment, with nervous hand, he shuffled the papers on his table.
Far back in the past, when his eyes were not yet dimmed by the dust blown from law-books, nor his ears deadened by the stridulent clamor of litigation, before his life had gone in attempts at
“Mastering the lawless science of our law,”
or he had lost himself in
“That codeless myriad of precedent,