Concerning Isabel Carnaby

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

"By the way, it will be interesting when Seaton begins to teach you to hold your tongue," remarked Bobby to Isabel, "if he can accomplish that, he will be able to unite the offices of Prime Minister, Commander-in-Chief and Archbishop of Canterbury in his own person, as he will have proved that the impossible is mere play to him."

"He will never try to teach me, you see, because he enjoys my conversation more than anything."

"Does he?" said Bobby softly. "Do you know I once went on a switchback railway with a man who said he enjoyed the motion more than anything? the next thing he said was that he wished he was dead."

The talk rippled on till tea was over, and then they all got up and walked about. As Paul and Isabel were leaning over the parapet and looking down into the water, Mr. Kesterton and Lady Farley passed within earshot, and the Cabinet Minister was saying: "I feel certain that he will be in the Government before long; there is no doubt he has a great future before him. It is a pity that he ever wrote that silly book, Shams and Shadows; but this clever niece of yours will keep him straight now. The men with clever wives are not the men who make mistakes, Lady Farley."

Paul looked down upon his wife and smiled; but the eyes that Isabel raised to his were full of tears.

Not long after the tea-party on the terrace, Edgar Ford dined at the Paul Seatons' pretty little house in Kensington. Mr. Madderley was there; also Mr. Seaton, who was spending a few days with his son, and was very much enjoying a sight of London under Isabel's auspices.

Edgar and Alice were to be married in the autumn; and the former had already taken a house close to the Stepney Settlement, and was making ready for his bride.

The conversation at dinner ran upon Edgar's work among the poor; and he made the others both laugh and cry at the mingled humour and pathos of his stories. Mr. Seaton especially was interested in the doings of the Settlement, and gave Edgar some valuable hints from out of the stores of his own wisdom and experience.

"The thing that strikes me most forcibly," said Edgar, when the servants had left the room, "is the kindness of the poor to one another. Underneath all the squalor and sordidness of poverty, there is something beautiful after all."

"You are right there," agreed Mr. Seaton. "I have, of course, worked much among the poor in my time, and this phase of their character has never failed to impress me."