"You've not overdone it, have you? Not been lapsing into your old style of flirtation, and--"
"No; on my honour, no. I rather think some of her friends have been putting the moral screw on. You recollect a Miss Lexden--Mrs. Churchill that is now?"
"Perfectly! But she would not be likely to object to a flirtation."
"Not as mademoiselle, but as madame she has rangéed herself, and I believe her husband is a straight-laced party. She was up at Uplands for a couple of days, and rather snubbed me when I presented myself there in my fraternal character. I've been putting things together in my mind, and I begin to think that Mrs. Schröder's coldness dated from Mrs. Churchill's visit."
"Likely enough. I daresay Mrs. Churchill goes in tremendously now for all the domestic virtues. If a reformed rake makes the best husband, a penitent flirt ought to make the best wife; and, by all accounts, Miss Barbara Lexden was a queen of the art. I hear that she and her husband lead a perpetually billing-and-cooing existence, like a pair of genteelly-poor turtles, in some dovecot near Gray's Inn."
"That man Lyster's been a good deal to the house lately, too. I always hated that fellow, and I know he hates me; he looks at me sometimes as though he could eat me. Schröder seems to have taken a fancy to him; and I sometimes half fancy that he has a kind of spoony attachment to Mrs. Schröder--if you recollect, I told you I thought he was after her when we were all down at Bissett--though I don't think very much of that. I'll tell you what it is, Simnel," continued Mr. Beresford, in a burst of confidence, straggling up into a sitting position on the sofa, and beating his legs with the folded newspaper as he spoke, "I'm getting devilish sick of all this dodging and duffing, and I've been thinking seriously of calling my creditors together, getting them to take so much a-year, and then going in quietly and marrying Kate Mellon after all."
Mr. Simnel's face flushed but for an instant; it was its normal colour when he said,
"You're mad! You, with the ball at your foot, to think of such a course! So much a-year, indeed! Butchers and bakers do that sort of thing, I believe, when they've been let in; but not forty-per-cent men; not money-lending insurance-offices. Breathe a hint of your state, and they'd be down upon you at once, and sell you up like old sticks. Besides, you couldn't come to any arrangement with your creditors without its leaking out somehow. It would get into those infernal trade-circulars, or protection-gazettes, or whatever they're called; and if the Bishop or Lady Lowndes heard of it, all your chances of inheriting in either of those quarters would be blown to the winds. As to--to Kate Mellon, you may judge how your alliance with her would please either of the august persons I have named."
"Jove! you're right," said Beresford, biting his nails.
"Right, of course I am; and here you've only to wait, and an heiress--a delightful little creature to boot--is absolutely thrown into your arms. You're a child, Charley, in some things,--you clever men always have a slate off somewhere, you know,--and in business you're a positive child. Can't you see that yours must be a waiting race?--that you mustn't mind being hustled, and bothered, and cramped, at the beginning, but must always keep your eyes open for your chance, and then make the running? The least impetuosity, such as you hint at, would throw away every hope, and destroy a very excellently planned scheme. Oh, you needn't wince at the word; we are all schemers in love, as well as in every thing else, if we only acknowledged it."