"Yes, sir."
"You must be some relative of Hyacinth Prentice of Prentice and Morales?"
I said I was his son.
"Give me your hand, my boy!" said the old gentleman, impulsively. It was the last time I was to be called a boy; but I suppose I seemed young to him, and, indeed, a permanent immaturity of aspect is one of my disadvantages.
"I knew your father well," goes on old Lyman Rees. "He was one of the first friends I made when I came to London in sixty—sixty——? Oh, very well, my dear," for Althea had laid her hand gently upon his mouth. "We lost sight of one another before the trouble. I wrote him, though. I said: 'Don't try to reconstruct! Don't show the bad trading! Buy off the debenture holders! Give them twice the value in ordinary shares if they insist, and raise another hundred thousand in debenture on the Chili property.' But your father was an ill man to advise. Ah, well; it's an old tale to-day. Althea, we mustn't lose sight of Hy Prentice's son. When we are dining by ourselves?"
Althea gave a date that was significantly far ahead.
"But I'm always at home on Sundays," she added, smiling a good-bye. "Come in whenever the English Sunday becomes unendurable, Mr. Prentice."
My floral offering must have been only one of many she received, for all manner of fine friends rallied to her in her trouble; but, perhaps, coming from a poor devil of a working journalist, the tribute struck her imagination. A few days afterward I got a little note chiding me for never having taken advantage of the old invitation, and bidding me to dinner at the end of the week.
I am not a sentimentalist, whatever Winstanley may pretend he believes, but I confess that in the course of a friendship which dated from this dinner Althea became a sort of a heroine with me. Poor woman! the veil had been so roughly snatched from all the tender privacies of her life that I think I had the same satisfaction in bringing her my sympathy and consideration as a knight-errant may have felt, covering with his own cloak the naked, shamefaced captive whom his sword had cut loose in the forest. In fact, we became so far friends that one night, more than six months after her decree had been confirmed, she bade me, in saying good-night, congratulate her on a very serious step she was taking on the morrow. I thought she was going to be married, and I admit my heart sank a little. But it was nothing of the sort, as she explained hastily. She was on the eve of reception into the Roman Catholic Church.