“‘Faith, my dear Ada,” Bertham said lightly, “the rôle of guardian angel is one you were cut out for, and suits you very well. But be content, one begs of you, to play it nearer home!... I know a worthy young man, at present in a situation in a large business-house at Westminster, who would very much benefit by a push here and a pull there from a hand invisible or visible—visible preferred! And to be told ‘Do this!’ or ‘Don’t do that!’ in a moment of doubt or at a crisis of indecision, would spare the Member for West Wealdshire a great many sleepless nights.”
They laughed together; then she said, with the rose-flush fading out of her pale cheeks and the light of merriment in her blue-gray eyes subdued again to clear soft radiance:
“I do not like those sleepless nights. Can nothing be done for them?”
“They are my only chance,” he answered, “of gaining any acquaintance with the works of modern novelists.”
“You do not take Sir Walter Scott, or Mr. Thackeray, or Mr. Dickens, or the author of Jane Eyre, as sleeping-draughts?”
“No,” returned Bertham, “for the credit of my good taste. But there are others whose works Cleopatra might have called for instead of mandragora. As regards the newspapers, if it be not exactly agreeable or encouraging to know exactly how far Misrepresentation can go without being absolute Mendacity—it is salutary and wholesome, I suppose, to be told when one has fallen short of winning even appreciation for one’s honest endeavor to do one’s duty—or what one conceives to be one’s duty—tolerably well?”
He rose, pushing his chair aside, and took a turn in the room that carried him to the window.
“One has made mistakes,” he said, keeping his face turned from her soft kind look; “but so have other fellows, without being pilloried and pelted for them! And two years back, when the office of Secretary At War seemed to have been created for the purpose of affording His Grace the Secretary For War and other high officials, unlimited opportunities of pulling down what the first-named had built up, and of building up what he, with hopes of doing good, had pulled down, the pelting bruised. But—Jove! if that part of my life were mine to live all over again, with Experience added to my youthful enthusiasms, I might reasonably hope to achieve much! Happy you”—he came and stood beside her chair, looking down at the calm profile and plainly-parted, faintly-rippling brown hair with a certain wistfulness—“most happy are you, dear Ada, who have so nobly fulfilled the high promise of your girlhood, and have no need to join in useless regrets with me!”
She smiled, and lifted her warm, womanly hand to him, and said, as he enclosed it for a second in his own:
“Wrong leads and false ideals are the lot of all of us. And you were of so much use in your high office, Robert, and wielded your power so much for others’ good; you strive so chivalrously now, in thankless, unpopular causes; you make your duty so paramount above your ambition in all things,—that I am tempted to paraphrase your words to me, and tell you that you have gloriously contradicted the promise of your Eton boyhood, when everything that was not Football, or Boating, or Cricket, was ‘bad form.’”