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Rh 'If she were nice it would be so sweet to have her for a daughter. I also am very much alone, though perhaps not so much as you are, Lady Mason.'

'I hope not—for I am sometimes very lonely.'

'I have often thought that.'

'But I should be wicked beyond everything if I were to complain, seeing that Providence has given me so much that I had no right to expect. What should I have done in my loneliness if Sir Peregrine's hand and door had never been opened to me?' And then for the next half-hour the two ladies held sweet converse together, during which we will go back to the gentlemen over their wine.

'Are you drinking claret?' said Sir Peregrine, arranging himself and his bottles in the way that was usual to him. He had ever been a moderate man himself, but nevertheless he had a businesslike way of going to work after dinner, as though there was a good deal to be done before the drawing-room could be visited.

'No more wine for me, sir,' said Lucius.

'No wine!' said Sir Peregrine the elder.

'Why, Mason, you'll never get on if that's the way with you,' said Peregrine the younger.

'I'll try at any rate,' said the other.

'Water-drinker, moody thinker,' and Peregrine sang a word or two from an old drinking-song.

'I am not quite sure of that. We Englishmen I suppose are the moodiest thinkers in all the world, and yet we are not so much given to water-drinking as our lively neighbours across the Channel.'

Sir Peregrine said nothing more on the subject, but he probably thought that his young friend would not be a very comfortable neighbour. His present task, however, was by no means that of teaching him to drink, and he struck off at once upon the business he had undertaken. 'So your mother tells me that you are going to devote all your energies to farming.'

'Hardly that, I hope. There is the land, and I mean to see what I can do with it. It is not much, and I intend to combine some other occupation with it.'

'You will find that two hundred acres of land will give you a good deal to do;—that is if you mean to make money by it.'

'I certainly hope to do that,—in the long run.'

'It seems to me the easiest thing in the world,' said Peregrine.

'You'll find out your mistake some day; but with Lucius Mason it is very important that he should make no mistake at the commencement. For a country gentleman I know no prettier amusement than experimental farming;—but then a man must give up all idea of making his rent out of the land.'