"William!--be a bear if you like, but not an idiot!"

"Perfectly true," he declared; "not the dazzlers and the high-fliers,
anyway--the only ones it would be an excitement to carry off."

"You know very well," she said, slowly, "that now you might marry
anybody."

He threw his head back rather haughtily.

"Oh! I wasn't thinking about money, and that kind of thing. Well, give
me time, mother--don't hurry me! And now I'd better stop talking
nonsense, change my clothes, and be off. Good-bye, dear--you shall hear
when the job's perpetrated!"

"William, really!--don't say these things--at least to anybody but me.
You understand very well"--she drew herself up rather finely--"that if I
hadn't known, in spite of your apparent idleness, you would do any work
they _set_ you to do, to your own credit and the country's, I'd never
have lifted a finger for you!"

William Ashe laughed out.

"Oh! intriguing mother!" he said, stooping again to kiss her. "So you
admit you did it?"

He went off gayly, and she heard him flying up-stairs three steps at a
time, as though he were still an untamed Eton boy, and there were no
three weeks' hard political fighting behind him, and no interview which
might decide his life before him.