“A judge?  That’s rather a large order.  But you know you mustn’t tell stories, you little minx.  Miss Batchelor’s too clever to take all that in.”

“Well, but it’s true.  You are going to be a barrister, and everybody knows that barristers grow into judges, if you feed them properly.”

“But I haven’t the remotest intention of being a barrister.  How did you get hold of that notion?”

“Oh, I knew it all along.  Papa said so.”

“You must have been mistaken.”

“Not a bit.  I’ll tell you exactly what he said.  I heard him talking about it to mother in the library.  I wasn’t listening, you know.  I—­I heard your name, and I couldn’t help it.  He said he expected to see you figuring in the law courts some of these days—­Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Division.”

Tyson rose, putting her down from his knee as if she had been a baby.

“I hope you didn’t tell Miss Batchelor that?”

“Yes, I did though—­rather!”

He smiled in spite of himself.  “What did she do?”

“Oh, she just stared—­over her shoulder; you know her way.”

“Look here, Molly, you must not go about saying that sort of thing.  People here don’t understand it; they’ll only think—­”

“What?”

“Never mind what they’ll think.  The world is chock-full of wickedness, my child.  But if half the people we meet are sinners, the other half are fools.  I never knew any one yet who wasn’t one or the other.  So don’t think about what they think, but mind what you say.  See?”

“I’m sorry.”  She had come softly up to the window where he stood; and now she was rubbing his sleeve with one side of her face and smiling with the other.

He stroked her hair.

“All right.  Don’t do it again, that’s all.”

“I won’t—­if you’ll only tell me one thing.  Were you ever engaged to anybody but me?”

“No; I was never engaged to anybody but you.”

“Then you were never in love with ten gentlemen at once like the Countess Pol—­”

His answer was cut short by the entrance of Sir Peter Morley, followed by
Captain Stanistreet.

CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST STONE

Tyson was much flattered by the rumor that Sir Peter Morley had pronounced his wife to be “the loveliest woman in Leicestershire”; for Lady Morley herself was a sufficiently splendid type, with her austere Puritan beauty.  As for the rector, it was considered that his admiration of Mrs. Nevill Tyson somewhat stultified his utterances in the pulpit.