Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Review

He had spoken very softly; for although Mr. Maybanke, according to his evening habit, was apparently sound asleep in his easy-chair, yet old gentlemen are known to have a disagreeable way of suddenly awaking and demanding, "What is the matter?"—when nothing is the matter.

Leaning through the conservatory door, Carey blew a whiff from his cigarette, while his eyes followed every movement of the little figure in a mourning dress sitting at a table in the long drawingroom beyond. Her attention was wholly given to the book which she was reading, her hands all the time whirling her knitting-pins. Still, it was evident that she must have heard him, for the whispered VOL. CCLXVIII. NO. 1909.

words had brought a mischievous little smile to her lips, and the downcast eyelids quivered. Just then Mrs. Maybanke returned to the room, a little put out that her maid had been enjoying the contents of the new number of her favourite magazine before herself; and finding that some trace of Carey's tobacco had found its way into the room during her absence, called to him to close the conservatory door.

Carey cast a rueful glance at Banny, and her answering nod of amusement was perhaps the reason why Mr. Maybanke was so effectually startled from his evening nap by the sudden banging of the glass door at his back.

Surrounded by the weird and fanciful shapes of his father's orchids, Carey Maybanke lay back in his rocking-chair, half closed his eyes, and gave himself up to a half-hour's meditation. Blanche was probably now accusing him of a fit of sulking, and she was really so very provoking, that she deserved some such treatment at his hands. He put up his feet comfortably, and began to think.

He had, indeed, thought

He was of course thinking of Blanche. of nothing else for the last six months. But now, as he lounged there comfortably, his brow was contracted into a frown, as though the subject of so many pleasant meditations were after all suggestive of disquietude at times. He turned to look at the little group in the drawing-room beyond,-his mother smiling over her magazine; his father staring at the fire, his sharply knuckled hands now grasping his gold-headed cane, now spread to the glow, without which his chilly old frame could not do, even in these last days of summer; and, still knitting, still reading, Blanche Gressell, the cause of a week's troubled happiness to him, the cause of a future which just now looked very cloudy.

If only his father had allowed him to enter some profession, so that he might feel he would have a right to exercise an independent choice! If only he had been as poor as the little fair-haired girl over there, who had begun to earn her own living at twelve years old, when he was a boy at school! Above all, if only the Ladywood property had never come into the market!

Carey, conscious of energy and capacity to make his own way in the world, if allowed to do so, felt that he was being badly treated by his father. Since taking his degree he had constantly pressed this wish upon him, but he had not been listened to, and by this time he had spent some months in enforced idleness at home. Not but that Mr. Maybanke had very definite ideas and plans with regard to his son's future. He himself had spent the greater part of his life in a

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