“Oh!  I suppose so.  Yes, I daresay....  And suppose my uncle cuts him off with a shilling?  He’s quite capable of it.  He’s a very heavy father, you know.”

“He won’t.  I shall talk to him too.”

“Yes; but suppose he does?”

She threw him a swift glance.

“Frank’ll put the shilling on his watch-chain, after it’s been shown with all the other wedding-presents.  What are you going to give me, Mr. Dick?”

“I shall design a piece of emblematic jewelry,” said Dick very gravely.  “When’s the wedding to be?”

“Well, we hadn’t settled.  Lord Talgarth wouldn’t make up his mind.  I suppose next summer some time.”

“Miss Jenny—­”

“Yes?”

“Tell me—­quite seriously—­what you’d do if there was a real row—­a permanent one, I mean—­between Frank and my uncle?”

“Dear Mr. Dick—­don’t talk so absurdly.  I tell you there’s not going to be a row.  I’m going to see to that myself.”

“But suppose there was?”

Jenny stood up abruptly.

“I tell you I’m a very sensible person, and I’m not going to imagine absurdities.  What do you want me to say?  Do you want me to strike an attitude and talk about love in a cottage?”

“Well, that would be one answer.”

“Very well, then.  That’ll do, won’t it?  You can take it as said....  I’m going to see what’s happening.”

But as she went to the door there came footsteps and voices outside; and the next moment the door opened suddenly, and Lord Talgarth, followed by his son and the Rector, burst into the room.

(II)

I am very sorry to have to say it, but the thirteenth Earl of Talgarth was exactly like a man in a book—­and not a very good book.  His character was, so to speak, cut out of cardboard—­stiff cardboard, and highly colored, with gilt edges showing here and there.  He also, as has been said, resembled a nobleman on the stage of the Adelphi.  He had a handsome inflamed face, with an aquiline nose and white eyebrows that moved up and down, and all the other things; he was stout and tall, suffered from the gout, and carried with him in the house a black stick with an india-rubber pad on the end.  There were no shades about him at all.  Construct a conventionally theatrical heavy father, of noble family, and you have Lord Talgarth to the life.  There really are people like this in the world—­of whom, too, one can prophesy, with tolerable certainty, how they will behave in any given situation.

Certainly, Lord Talgarth was behaving in character now.  He had received meek Mr. Mackintosh’s deferential telegram, occupying several sheets, informing him that his son had held an auction of all his belongings, and had proposed to take to the roads; asking, also, for instructions as to how to deal with him.  And the hint of defiant obstinacy on the part of Frank—­the fact, indeed, that he had taken his father at his word—­had thrown that father into a yet more violent fit of passion.  Jenny had heard him spluttering and exclamatory with anger as she came into the hall (the telegram had but that instant been put into his hands), and even now the footmen, still a little pale, were exchanging winks in the hall outside; while Clarkson, his valet, and the butler stood in high and subdued conference a little way off.