'You shall know it now, Edgar. There are two choices. If you are really engaged to this young lady' (Edgar made a nod of impatient scornful acquiescence, but certainly of acquiescence), 'then ask her honourably from her friends, and let whatever you do be open! Otherwise, give it up as an impossible imprudence, but drop all attempt at what is clandestine. Unless you do one or other of these, I warn you that I shall speak to Miss Pearson.'

'If you were a reasonable and experienced paterfamilias, instead of only a poor conscientious over-harassed prig of a boy, with more brothers and sisters than he knows what to do with, I'll tell you, in candid unprejudice, what you would do. Just let it alone! There are as many of such little affairs going as there are midges in a sunbeam; and they never do any one any harm, unless the higher powers make an unadvised hubbub.'

'Am I to understand that as an avowal that you know yourself to be trifling?'

'I know nothing about it. I don't live in the heroics, like some of my friends. In the rural seclusion of Bexley I saw a pretty lively girl, who, not to put too fine a point upon it, made quite as much up to the romantic young artist as ever the young artist did to her. Of course, there was an exchange of prettinesses, and life on either side became a blank when she was immured at Brompton, and the only solace left was the notes that so outrage your and Bobbie's united sense of propriety.'

'And what is to follow?'

'Is it to lead to?' he corrected, with a mimicry of Wilmet's tone. 'That depends. If you make the explosion, I shall have to rise to the occasion—keep the slip-knot ready and patent, and as soon as I get my head above water, have a wife and family on my back to keep me down, and hinder me from coming to your rescue. If not—why, it will take its chance, and we shall have a reasonable chance of trying whether we get tired of one another—the best thing that could happen to us, by-the-by—though she is such a saucy little darling, that were that picture of mine painted, I should be fool enough to marry her to-morrow.'

'And why—may I ask—seeing these things so clearly, did you draw the poor child into an engagement?'

Edgar shrugged his shoulders. 'You had better ask why she drew me. If you didn't know it before, my dear Felix, "'Tis human natur to be fools."'

'Allowing it to be folly, you do not mean to persist?'

'As if a poor fellow must always have a meaning! Life is not worth having if one is to be always so awfully in earnest.'