But the dreamer’s dream which he thought to scorn, Lived on when they both were dead...” 

“I asked him three times over if he would have another cup of coffee, and he stared at me as if he were daft! I believe he is half daft at times, and he will grow worse and worse, if Margot encourages him like this!” Agnes announced to her father, on his weary return from City.

It was one of Agnes’s exemplary habits to refuse all invitations which could prevent her being at home to welcome her father every afternoon, and assist him to tea and scones, accompanied by a minute résumé of the bad news of the day. What the housemaid had broken; what the cat had spilt; the parlourmaid’s impertinences; the dressmaker’s delinquencies; Ronald’s vapourings; the new and unabashed transgressions of Margot—each in its turn was dropped into the tired man’s cup with the lumps of sugar, and stirred round with the cream. There was no escaping the ordeal. On the hottest day of summer there was the boiling tea, with the hot muffins, and the rich, indigestible cake, exactly as they had appeared amidst the ice and snows of January; and the accompanied recital hardly varied more. It was a positive relief to hear that the chimney had smoked, or the parrot had had a fit.

Once a year Agnes departed on a holiday, handing over the keys to Margot, who meekly promised to follow in her footsteps; and then, heigho! for a fortnight of Bohemia, with every arrangement upside down, and appearing vastly improved by the change of position. Instead of tea in the drawing-room, two easy-chairs on the balcony overlooking the Park; cool iced drinks sipped through straws, and luscious dishes of fruit. Instead of Agnes, stiff and starched and tailor-made, a radiant vision in muslin and laces, with a ruffled golden head, and distracting little feet peeping out from beneath the frills.

“Isn’t this fun?” cried the vision. “Don’t you feel quite frivolous and Continental? Let’s pretend we are a newly-married couple, and you adore me, and can’t deny a thing I ask! There was a blouse in Bond Street this morning... Sweetest darling, wouldn’t you like me to buy it to-morrow, and show me off in it to your friends? I told them to send it home on approval. I knew you couldn’t bear to see your little girl unhappy for the sake of four miserable guineas!”

This sort of treatment was very agreeable to a worn-out City man, and as a pure matter of bargaining, the blouse was a cheap price to pay for the refreshment of that cool, restful hour, and the pretty chatter which smoothed the tired 

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