Mr. Alington nodded his head gravely.
"I think you are wise," he said, "though I could not take the responsibility of influencing your own opinion. I pay you for your name. Your name, to tell you the truth, is what I want. You delegate business to business men. I hope you will put the matter in the same light to Lord Abbotsworthy. With regard to your salary as chairman, I cannot make you a precise offer yet; tentatively, I should suggest five thousand a year."
Lord Conybeare had to perfection that very useful point of good breeding, namely, the ability to preserve a perfectly wooden face when hearing the most surprising news. Mr. Alington, for all the effect this information apparently had on it, might have been speaking to the leg of a table.
"That seems to me very handsome," he replied negligently.
"It seems to me about fair," said Mr. Alington.
Lord Conybeare was puzzled, and he wondered whether Kit would understand it all. How his name on a "front page," as Mr. Alington called it, with attendance at a few meetings, at which he would read a report, could be worth five thousand a year, he did not see, though he felt quite certain that Mr. Alington thought it was. Whether it would turn out to be so or not, he hardly cared at all; clearly that matter did not concern him. If anyone was willing to pay five thousand a year for his name they were perfectly welcome to have it; indeed, he would have taken a much smaller figure. He had no idea that marquises were at such a premium. His distinguished ancestry had suddenly become an industrial company, paying heavily. "The new Esau," he thought to himself, "and a great improvement on the old. I only lend my birthright, and the pottage I receive is really considerable."
Some time before they had reached this point in their conversation the punt had been taken across the river again to fetch Kit and Alice Haslemere back from church, and as Mr. Alington said his last words it had returned again with the jaded church-goers. He put on his straw hat, picked up the big tune hymn-book, and with Conybeare strolled down to the bottom of the lawn to meet them.
"Devotion is so very fatiguing," said Kit, in a harassed voice, as she stepped on to the grass. "Alice and I feel as if we had been having the influenza—don't we, dear? And I've lost my cigarette-case. It is too tiresome, because I meant to pawn it. I am sure I left it in the punt."
Jack took it out of his pocket and returned it to her.
"Thank your dear husband you didn't step on it," he remarked.