We arrived home in time to dress for dinner. Lord Arthur had laid out my evening clothes, and was still in the room, evidently ready for a little conversation.

"Well, I suppose you met some pretty low-down swabs at old Perry's club," he began "What did you do there?"

"I played bridge," I said, "and lost—I mean won—two hundred and thirty-four pounds. I have accepted a U.O.Me for it. What do you do if you haven't got the money?"

"Why, wait till you get landed with some, and swop it off. You're jolly lucky! It's a dangerous game. Why, you might have had to receive it! Who did you play with?"

"Lord Charles Delagrange was my partner. Do you know him?"

His face changed. "He's my uncle, I'm sorry to say," he said stiffly. "But if I were to meet him in the street I should look the other way. He's a swab of the first water."

"He seems cheerful enough," I said, "and enjoys his life thoroughly, to all appearances."

"I dare say he does. But there must be times when he asks himself whether the company he keeps is worth the price he pays for it. He can't get any other. I shouldn't think there's a servants' hall in the country that would be open to him now."

"I suppose the best society in the place is to be found in the servants' hall."

"Of course it is—the best female society. You must come and dine with us one night here. We'll give you a very poor dinner."

"Thank you. You are very kind."

"Not at all. Of course, it's a little different in this house. We have to keep up the farce, and we don't like to put people like the Perrys out. We generally choose a night for our parties when they are dining out. In other houses you can just tell them upstairs that there won't be any regular dinner for them, when you think of having guests of your own."

At that moment Edward came into the room, and Lord Arthur left us, saying that he must go and help Mr. Blother with the table.

Edward seemed a trifle disturbed. "I say," he said, "what is all this about your being a Highlander?"

"Well, Miss Miriam and I settled it between ourselves that England must be in the Highlands somewhere," I explained.

He looked at me with some suspicion. "It's all very well to have a joke," he said, "and the story you made up to me was certainly very ingenious and amusing, though highly absurd. But I don't think you ought to want to keep it up any longer. It amused Miriam, but there's always the danger, where a young girl lives in such surroundings as these, that she may get a taste for luxury. You ought not to make it out to her that people could live anywhere in the way you pretend without disgrace. It is apt to confound right and wrong."

"My dear fellow," I said, "I quite see your point. But Miss Miriam is so level-headed that I am sure she would never be affected in that way."

"Perhaps not," he said. "Still, I think it is time you dropped it. Of course, I shouldn't dream of asking you where you really do come from, if you don't want to tell me. It is quite obvious that you are well-born and well-educated, and that is enough for me."

"My dear Edward, if you will let me call you so, I appreciate your delicacy. All I have told you is true, but I have not the slightest wish to publish it abroad if you think it would be better that I shouldn't."

"I think it is much better that you shouldn't, unless you wish to lie under the suspicion of being touched in the head."

"No, I don't wish that at all. As I am already supposed to be a Highlander, suppose we keep to that."

"Well, if you like," he said unwillingly. "But if you are supposed to have come from the Highlands, you ought to be more than a little learned. I wonder you haven't already been asked what your subject is. Is there any branch of learning in which you are an expert?"

"I took a First Class in the Classical Schools of my university, and am a Fellow of my College, if you know what that means."

His face brightened.[24] "Of course, you are a Highlander," he said, with a smile. "I don't know why you want to make such a mystery of it; I suppose it is out of modesty. Well, I won't bother you any more; I must go and dress. My married sister, by the by, is coming to dine with her husband. He is a very good fellow, and I am sure you will get on with him. He is striving hard to overcome the defects of his birth. You remember that I told you my sister had married into the Stock Exchange."

I found the family assembled in the drawing-room. I was quite pleased to see Miriam again. I thought she looked very sweet in her white frock. She had a lovely neck and shoulders, and her hair was very soft and fair. She smiled at me as I came in, in a friendly fashion, and seemed quite to have forgotten that a slight cloud had hung over us when we had last parted. I remembered that I had not yet pumped Edward about the mystery of the garden.

I was introduced to Mr. and Mrs. Eppstein. Mr. Perry's eldest daughter must have been some years older than Miriam. She was good-looking, but wore a prim pinched-up expression. Her husband looked nervous. He was a youngish dark man, with a small moustache and hot hands. He said: "I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, sir," when we were introduced.

I took in Mrs. Perry, and had Miriam on the other side of me. Owing to the smallness of the party, Mr. and Mrs. Eppstein sat next to one another, on the other side of the table.

Curiously enough, the question I had been meaning to ask of Edward was answered for me during the conversation with which we began.

"I have a piece of news for you," said Mrs. Eppstein, to the company generally. "They say that Lady Grace Perkins has asked Sir Hugo Merton into her garden."

Everyone expressed that sort of interest with which the news of an unexpected engagement is received.

"Hugo Merton!" exclaimed Lord Arthur, who was handing round the soup. "Why, I thought he was always hanging round little Rosie Fletcher's gate."

"She wouldn't give him the invitation he wanted," said Mr. Blother, "and I suppose he got tired of waiting for it. A glass of sherry, Edward?"

"No thank you," said Edward. "Didn't Lady Grace ask John Hardy into her garden last summer?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Eppstein; "it was he who told Herman." She turned to her husband. "The large spoon, pet," she whispered, and then asked aloud: "Didn't he say that her garden was very badly kept, dear?"

Mr. Eppstein blushed awkwardly. "He said it wasn't so tyesty as some he'd been in," he said.

This reply caused some slight embarrassment, which Mr. Perry sought to dissipate by saying: "John Hardy has certainly received invitations from a good many ladies. No doubt he has a way with him."

"It is quite time he asked for a key," said Mrs. Perry somewhat severely. "It is not fair on nice girls that he should go from one garden to another as he does. And it is very ill-bred to talk about them to others."

"I didn't arst 'im abaht it," said Mr. Eppstein.

"'Ask,' pet, not 'arst,'" whispered his wife.

Mr. Eppstein accepted the correction. "I didn't ask him," he said. "I fancy he was upset like at getting the chuck, and wanted to sye somethink narsty."

"Very likely that was it," said Mr. Perry, covering Mrs. Eppstein's further corrections. "Well, I am sure I hope Lady Grace and Sir Hugo will be happy together, and that it will end in his asking her for a key. He wants a wife, and a home of his own. Our friend, Sir Hugo, is employed in a large drapery establishment, Mr. Howard, where they have the system of living in. You don't know anything about that over the mountains."

"And you don't know anything about my lady's garden, either," said Edward, leaning forward to address me across his sister. "I suppose you hardly understand what we have been talking about?"

"I have gathered something of what it means," I said, glad to be able to avow my ignorance, for Miriam's benefit, "but I didn't know before. I suppose if a lady asks a man into her garden, it means that she—she likes him?"

"She would not do it," said Mrs. Perry, "unless he had first shown that he liked her, and would be glad to have the invitation."

"Rather a delicate subject for conversation at the dinner-table, isn't it?" put in Mr. Blother, from the carving-table, where he was slicing the salmon. "Why not let the men explain it when the ladies have left the room?"

This suggestion was acceded to, and we talked on other subjects as long as the ladies were with us.

Mrs. Eppstein seemed anxious that I should understand that, although she had married beneath her, she had not done it for fun, so to speak. She talked a great deal about lifting the richer classes, and her husband seemed quite to fall in with her views upon the subject. I noticed that as dinner progressed he drank considerably more wine than Edward did, though not so much as Mr. Perry, and was inclined to take a larger share in the conversation than at the beginning.

The subject of the servants[25] was introduced over dessert, and Eppstein waxed eloquent and indignant at being expected to give up the use of his library after dinner, because the house-maid was reading up for matriculation at the Culbut University, and wanted a quiet room to work in.

"Well, of course, we can sit in the drawing-room," said Mrs. Eppstein. "I don't mind that so much. But what I really had to put down my foot about the other day was the new parlour-maid objecting to Herman and me talking together at meals. I said, 'It may be quite reasonable to impose silence upon the usual rich and vulgar family, but I should never think of submitting to such a rule myself.' And then she had the impudence to say that she didn't mind my talking, and I could talk to her if I liked, but the master's accent was so disagreeable that it unfitted her for her work. I told her that my husband and I were one, and that if I could put up with it she could."

"Domestic servants are not what they were," said Mrs. Perry. "There used to be something like friendship between them and their mistresses. I know many ladies, who went out to service as girls, who still visit their old mistresses, and even ask them to their own houses. But that kindly feeling is getting rare nowadays. I do not think it is all the fault of the mistresses, either, although with the spread of education, they are certainly getting very uppish."

"I think that it is entirely the fault of the servants," said Edward. "The rich are not content now to be mere drudges, and to spend their lives on being waited on hand and foot. And it is not right that they should be. Servants are really a parasitical class, and it is unfair that the burden of providing them with work should be put upon the rich, when they are so over-burdened already with having to consume more than their fair share of the produce of the country."

"There'll be a strike some day," said Eppstein rather excitedly. "You mark my words. If the rich was to combine together and say they wouldn't eat no more than they wanted to, and all was to agree to chuck the food they didn't want away, p'raps the poor would think twice about piling it up on them."

"That would be a serious day for the country," said Mr. Perry. "We must work by legitimate means, not anarchy. The solution of the problem of over-production can only come, I feel sure, by more individual members of the community sympathising with the rich, and sharing their lives, as we try to do here. It is not easy, I know. I have spent my own time in a humble endeavour to lead the way, but sometimes I am rather inclined to sink under the burden. I have my moments of dejection. There are times when I feel as if I positively cannot face the prospect of another rich meal."

He sat at the foot of the table with his shirt-front crumpled and eyes slightly glazed, and it was not difficult to believe that this was one of the moments he had so feelingly alluded to, in which his philanthropic efforts sat heavily on him.

But Edward, who had been as abstemious as had been permitted him, leant forward and put his hand on his father's. "Cheer up, dad," he said. "You are doing a noble work; you must not faint under it."

"I do feel rather faint," said Mr. Perry. "I wish Blother would bring the brandy."

The ladies left us at this point, and Edward, who was in a mood of harangue, went into this question of food, which counted for so much in the economic problems of Upsidonia.

"You see, it must all come down to that in the end," he said. "Agricultural and pastoral pursuits are so much sought after that the over-production of food is the most serious item in the general over-production of the country. The cry of 'back to the towns' is all very well, but people won't live in artificial surroundings if they have once tasted the pleasure and excitement of hard bodily toil; and you can't make them."

"Well, you wouldn't like it yourself for long," said Eppstein, "not if you know when you're well off. 'Ow did you get 'ere from the 'Ighlands? Walk? Tell us abaht it."

"We were going to tell Howard about my lady's garden," said Edward. "You see, Howard, in the country there is room for everybody, and the young men and young girls can go courting in a natural way, in lanes with briar hedges and nightingales and the moon, and all that sort of thing. They can secure the necessary privacy. But in towns there is so little privacy. It is the one thing in which the rich are really better off than the poor, because they have large houses and gardens of their own."

"Which seem to belong more to their servants than to them," I said.

"Well, of course, the servants have to be considered. I am not an extremist, and I do not advocate, as some do, that property should carry no disadvantages other than those obviously inherent in it. If the rich, for instance, were allowed to surround themselves with the gracious things of life—space, freedom, flowers, art, leisure for study and self-improvement—without the checks that a wise State has imposed upon the abuse of those things, the incentive to break loose from the bonds of property would be lessened. Don't you agree with me, Herman?"

"It's a bore, sometimes, to 'ave to eat too much," Eppstein corroborated him.

"Quite so!" said Mr. Perry, awakening suddenly out of a species of trance. "Quite so, Herman! Then why eat too much? I ask you—why eat too much?"

"'Cos the State makes you," said Eppstein.

"Ah!" said Mr. Perry, wagging his head with an expression of deep wisdom. "But now you're talking politics." He then relapsed into his former air of aloofness.

"Well, to come back to my lady's garden," said Edward. "It is generally acknowledged that it is a good thing for young girls to be alone sometimes, and in beautiful surroundings, so that they may feed their minds on beautiful thoughts. So every girl in the towns, when she reaches a certain age, has a garden of her own given to her, which she has to look after entirely herself. She can retire into it whenever she pleases, and nobody may break in on her privacy. When she accepts the attentions of a man, she invites him into her garden, and if the intimacy between them stands the test, by and by he asks her for a key. If she consents to give him one, he has the right to enter her garden whenever he pleases."

"A very pretty notion," I said, thinking all the time how dreadfully forward I must have seemed to Miriam in asking her to show me the garden—which she must naturally have taken to mean her garden—after about an hour's acquaintance, and wondering how soon I could get her to ask me to see it of her own accord.

Eppstein laughed rather vulgarly. "You should see the old maids standing with their garden gates wide open," he said.

"Oh, not all of them, Herman," expostulated Edward. "And some of the old maids' gardens are as beautifully kept as any young girl's, and it is quite a privilege to be invited into them. You are not expected to ask for a key, and if you did they wouldn't give you one."

"Oh, wouldn't they!" exclaimed Eppstein. "You try, my boy. Now look 'ere, I'll tell you. When I was courtin' Amelia——"

But he did not continue his reminiscences, for Mr. Perry, suddenly emerging from his gloomy trance, sang with a happy smile:

"When I married A-me-li-ar, Rum-ti tumti tum,"—and then laughed consumedly.

We all shared in his hilarity, and when he had relapsed once more into his solemn and even dejected mood, with the same suddenness as he had emerged from it, I asked: "Do they give up their gardens when they marry?"

"Seldom at once," said Edward. "They need not give them up at all, and there are cases of old men and women still keeping up the gardens in which they first made love to one another, and retiring to them frequently. But in practice they are generally given up within a year or so. They haven't the time to look after them."

At this point Mr. Perry said that he felt rather giddy. He thought he had done rather too much during the day, and would be better in bed. So Mr. Blother was summoned to help him upstairs, and we went into the drawing-room without him.

We talked, and Miriam played to us. It was delightful to sit by the open window, looking out on to the lovely garden, which lay mysterious under a sky of spangled velvet, and listen to the sweet music she made.

By and by I felt that I did not want to talk any more, and fortunately I was left to myself for a time, where I could see the garden, and by turning my head could also see Miriam, her fair hair irradiated by the shaded lamp that stood by the piano.

Soft thoughts began to steal over me—very soft thoughts, and very sweet ones. I thought how delightful it would be to sit every evening like this and listen to Miriam playing; and still more delightful if there should come a time when she would shut the piano and come across the room and put her hand on my shoulder, and look out on to the moonlight lawn and the dark shrubs and the starry sky with me; and neither of us would want to speak, but only to feel that the other was there.

And the night before I had spent in prison, and had not even known that there was such a girl as Miriam!