"Oh, yes, I know; but then I discovered you."

"Ah, but a still higher honour belongs to me, for I discovered you,"

retorted Henry. "When you consider that I discovered three such wonderful persons as you and Angel and Mike, don't you think, on the whole, that I'm singularly modest?"

"Do you love me?" said Esther, presently, quite irrelevantly.

"Do you love _me_?"

"I asked first."

"Well, for the sake of argument, let us say 'yes.'"

"How much?"

"As big as the world."

"Oh, well, then, let's have some Benedictine with the coffee!" said Esther.

"I've thought of something better, more 'sacramental,'" said Henry, smiling, "but you couldn't conscientiously drink it with me. It's the red drink of perfect love. Will you drink it with me?"

"Of course I will."

So the waiter brought a bottle bearing the beautiful words, "_Parfait Amour_."

"It's like blood," said Esther; "it makes me a little frightened."

"Would you rather not drink it?" asked Henry. "You know if you drink it with me, you must drink it with no one else. It is the law of it that we can only drink it with one."

"Not even with Mike?"

"Not even with Mike."

"What of Angel?"

"I will drink it with no one but you as long as I live."

"I will drink it then."

They held up their gla.s.ses.

"Dear old Esther!"

"Dear old Henry!"

And then they laughed at their solemnity. It was deeply sworn!

When Esther reached home that evening, she found a further telegram from Mike, announcing his arrival at Euston; and she had scarcely read it when she heard her father's voice calling her. She went immediately to the dining-room.

"Esther, dear," he said, "your mother and I want a word with you."

"No, James, you must speak for yourself in this," said Mrs. Mesurier, evidently a little perturbed.

"Well, dear, if I must be alone in the matter, I must bear it; I cannot shrink from my duty on that account." Then, turning to Esther, "I called you in to speak to you about Mike Laflin--"

"Yes, father," exclaimed Esther, with a little gasp of surprise.

"I met Mr. Laflin on the boat this morning, and was much astonished and grieved to hear of the rash step his son has chosen to take. The matter has evidently been kept from me,"--strictly speaking, it had; "I understand, though on that again I have not been consulted, that you and Mike have for some time been informally engaged to each other. Now you know my views on the theatre, and I am sure that you must see that Mike's having taken such a step must at once put an end to any such idea. Your own sense of propriety would, I am sure, tell you that, without any words from me--"

"Father!" cried Esther, in astonishment.

"You know that I considered Mike a very nice lad. His family is respectable; and he would have come into a very comfortable business, if he hadn't taken this foolish freak into his head--"

"But, father, you have laughed at his recitations, yourself, many a time, here of an evening. What difference can there be?"

"There is the difference of the theatre, the contaminating atmosphere, the people it attracts, the harm it does--your father, as you know, has never been within a theatre in his life; is it likely that he can look with calmness upon his daughter marrying a man whose livelihood is to be gained in a scandalous and debasing profession?"

"Father, I cannot listen to your talking of Mike like that. If it is wrong to make people innocently happy, to make them laugh and forget their troubles, to--to--well, if it's wrong to be Mike--I'm sorry; but, wrong or right, I love him, and nothing will ever make me give him up."

Mrs. Mesurier here interrupted, "I told you, James, how it would be. You cannot change young hearts. The times are not the same as when you and I were young; and, though I'm sure I don't want to go against you, I think you are too hard on Esther. Love is love after all--and Mike's one of the best-hearted lads that ever walked."

"Thank you, mother," said Esther, impulsively, throwing her arms round her mother's neck, and bursting into tears, "I--I will never give--give--him up."

"No, dear, no; now don't distress yourself. It will all come right. Your father doesn't quite understand." And then a great tempest of sobbing came over Esther, and swept her away to her own room.

The father and mother turned to each other with some anger.

"James, I'm surprised at your distressing the poor child like that to-night; you might have known she would be sensitive, with Mike only gone to-day! You could surely have waited till to-morrow."

"I am surprised, Mary, that you can encourage her as you did. You cannot surely uphold the theatre?"

"Well, James, I don't know,--there are theatres and theatres, and actors and actors; and there have been some very good men actors after all, and some very bad men ministers, if it comes to that," she added; "and theatre or no theatre, love's love in spite of all the fathers and mothers in the world--"

"All right, Mary, I would prefer then that we spoke no more on the matter for this evening," and James Mesurier turned to his diary, to record, along with the state of the weather, and the engagements of the day, the undutiful conduct of Esther, and a painful difference with his wife.

Strange, that men who have themselves loved and begotten should thus for a moment imagine that a small social prejudice, or a narrow religious formula, can break the purpose of a young and vigorous pa.s.sion. Do they realise what it is they are proposing to obstruct? This is love--_love_, my dear sir, at once the mightiest might, and the rightest right in the universe! This is--Niagara--the Atlantic--the power of the stars--and the strength of the tides. It is all the winds of the world, and all the fires of the centre. You surely cannot be serious in asking it to take, in exchange, some obsolete objection against its beloved!

CHAPTER x.x.xIX

MIKE AFAR

This collision with her father braced up Esther's nerves, and made Mike's absence easier to bear. Her father made no more allusion to it.

He was entering that period when fathers, however despotic, content themselves with protest, where once they have governed by royal proclamation. He was losing heart to contend with his children. They must go their own ways--though it must not be without occasional severe and solemn warnings on his part.

Mike and Esther wrote to each other twice a week. They had talked of every day, but a wise instinct prompted them to the less romantic, but likely the more enduring arrangement. It would be none the less open to them to write fourteen letters a week if they wished, but to have had to admit that one letter a day was a serious tax, not only on one's other occupations, including idleness, but also on the amount of subject-matter available, would have been a dangerous correction of an impulsive miscalculation.