a slight financial difficulty once, his father—your young man's father, I mean—came to my assistance. And him not well off neither. Turning-point of my life. But for that help I should, likely enough, have gone down, and down, and down."  He looked at her for approval. "What's wrong with that?" 

 "He's a gentleman!" 

 Mr. Trew gazed for a few moments at a baby in a perambulator. 

 "I was born in 'fifty-five, the year of the Crimea War," he said deliberately, "and if my mother had had her way, I sh'd have been christened Sebastopol, which wouldn't have been any catch to a public man like myself. If I'm spared till next year, I shall be celebrating my jubilee, and all London will be illuminated, I expect, with military troops lining the streets. But what I want to tell you, missy, is that, all that time, I've never seen any good resulting from a girl in your position of life becoming friendly with any chap who was considerably above her in regard to what we call social status. On the other hand, I've seen harm come from it." 

 "There's going to be none in my case," she said quickly. 

 "I know, I know! I'm perfectly sure of that. That is to say, I'm absolutely certain that is your view now. I can't quite explain what I mean to any one of your age and your sex. If I was a well-educated man"—here he took off his cap and rubbed the top of his head with the peak—"I could find words to wrop it up somehow. The long and the short of it is, you relinquish the idea. To oblige me"—persuasively—"and to gratify your aunt, who's been pretty good to you since you were a child—" 

 "I don't forget that." 

 "—And for your own peace of mind in the future, give it all up, and you wait a bit until you find some one belonging to your own set." 

 "There isn't the distance between the sets there used to be," she argued. 

 He took hold of the railings with both hands, and tried to shake them in an effort of thought. 

 "What's the young chap's name?" 

 "I don't know." 

 "There you are!"—with gloomy triumph—"don't that prove the truth of everything I've been saying?" 

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