THE OSBORNES

BY
E. F. B E N S O N

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1909, 1910, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1910
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

THE OSBORNES

CHAPTER I

FOR the last five hours all the windows along the front of the newest and whitest and most pretentious and preposterous house in Park Lane had been blazing with lights, which were kindled while the last flames of the long July day had scarcely died down into the ash-coloured night, and were still shining when morning began to tinge the velvet gray of the sky with colour and extinguish the stars. The lights, however, in No. 92 seemed to be of more durable quality than the heavenly constellations and long after morning had come and the early traffic begun to boom on the roadway, they still burned with undiminished splendour. It was literally true, also, that all the windows in the long Gothic facade which seemed to have strayed from Nuremberg into the West End of London, had been ablaze; not only was the ground floor lit, and the first floor, where was the ballroom, out of which, all night, had floated endless webs of perpetual melody, but the bedrooms above, though sleep then would have been impossible, and, as a matter of fact, they were yet untenanted, had been equally luminous, while from behind the flamboyant balustrade the top of the house, smaller windows, which might be conjectured to belong to servants’ rooms, had joined in the general illumination. This was strictly in accordance with Mrs. Osborne’s orders, as given to that staid and remarkable person called by her (when she forgot) Willum and (when she remembered) Thoresby, and (also when she remembered) alluded to as “my major domo.” “Willum” he had been in earlier and far less happy years, first as boot boy, then when the family blossomed into footmen, as third, second, and finally first of his order. Afterward came things more glorious yet and Thoresby was major domo. At the present time Mrs. Osborne had probably forgotten that there existed such officers as boot boys, and Willum probably had forgotten too. The rise of the family had been remarkably rapid, but he had kept pace with it, and to-night he felt, as did Mrs. Osborne, that the eminence attained by them all was of a very exalted order.

Mrs. Osborne had ordered that every window in the front of the house was to be lit, and this sumptuous edict not without purpose. She said it looked more joyful and what was a little electric light, and as the evening had been devoted to joy, it was right that the house should reflect this quality. For herself, she felt very joyful indeed; the last month or two had, it is true, been arduous, and in all London it is probable that there had been nobody, man or woman, more incessantly occupied. But had there been an eight hours bill introduced and passed, which should limit the hours of energy for hostesses, she would have scorned to take advantage of so pusillanimous a measure. Besides, the nature of her work necessitated continuous effort, for her work was to effect the siege and secure the capitulation of London. That, with her great natural shrewdness, she realized had to be done quickly, or it would never be done at all. London had, not to be starved, but to be stuffed into surrender. She had to feed it and dance it and ply it with concerts and plays and entertainments till its power of resistance was sapped. Long quiet sieges, conducted with regularity, however untiring, were, she knew well, perfectly incapable of accomplishing its fall. The enemy—at times, though she loved it so well, she almost considered London to be her enemy—must be given no quarter and no time to consider its plans. The assault had to be violent as well as untiring; the dear foe must be battered into submission. To “arrive” at all, you had to gallop. And she had galloped, with such success that on this night in July, or rather on this cool dewy morning in July, she felt that the capitulation was signed and handed her. But she felt no chill of reaction, as is so often the case even in the very moment of victory, when energies not only can be relaxed, but must be relaxed since there is nothing for them to brace themselves over any more. Her victory was of different sort: she knew quite well that she would have to go on being extremely energetic, else the capitulated garrison would by degrees rally again. But since the exercise of these energies was delightful to her, she was merely charmed that there would be a continual call for them.

There was no “casement jessamine” on the house, which could “stir to the dancers dancing in tune” but on the walls of the lowest story, growing apparently from large earthenware pots filled with mould, were enormous plants of tin ivy which swarmed up the walls of the house. But it was too strongly and solidly made to stir even to the vibration produced by the earthquaking motor-buses which bounced down Park Lane, and thus the dancers dancing in tune had no effect whatever on it. This stalwart ivy was indeed a sort of symbol of the solidity of the fortunes of the house, for it was made at the manufactories from which her husband derived his really American wealth. They covered acres of ground at Sheffield, and from their doors vomited forth all sorts of metallic hardware of the most reliable quality. The imitation ivy, of course, was but a froth, a chance flotsam on the stream of hardware, and was due to the inventive genius of Mrs. Osborne’s eldest son Percy, who had a great deal of taste. His was no abstruse taste, like an appreciation of caviare or Strauss, that required an educated—or, as others might say—a vitiated palate or a jaded ear, but it appealed strongly and almost overwhelmingly, to judge by the order book of the Art Department, to the eye of that general public which goes in for forms of decoration which are known as both chaste and “handsome,” and are catholic enough to include mirrors framed in plush on which are painted bunches of flowers and bead curtains that hang over doors. With shrewd commercial instinct Percy never attempted to educate the taste of his customers into what they ought to want, but gave them in “handsome” catalogues lists of the things they did want, and of a quality that they would be sure to find satisfactory. Though this ivy, for instance, was from the excellence of its workmanship and the elaborate nature of its colouring rather expensive, it was practically indestructible till the melting point of the best tin was reached, and it resembled ivy so closely that you might perfectly well prick your fingers on it before you found out the art that so closely imitated nature. Indeed, before now some very pretty jesting had taken place in the windows of the house with regard to it, when Percy, who liked his joke (amid the scarcely suppressed merriment of the family), asked a stranger to pick a leaf of it and examine the beauties of nature as illustrated in the manner in which the stalk of the leaf was joined to the parent stem. Also it had no inconvenient habits of growing over places on which you did not wish it to trespass (if you wanted more, you ordered more), it harboured neither slugs nor any abominable insects and afforded no resting-place for birds, while it could be washed free from London dust by the simple application of the hand-syringe.

The ivy has been insisted on at some little length because it was typical of the fortunes and family of its inventor. It was solid, indestructible and new, and in just the same way the Osbornes were very strong and well, held large quantities of gilt-edged stock, and had no family history whatever. In one point only were they unlike the ivy that clung to the limestone wall of the house in Park Lane, but that was an important one. The point of the ivy was to deceive—it was often successful in so doing—while the Osbornes never intended to deceive anybody. There was, with regard at any rate to Mrs. Osborne, her husband, and Percy, no possibility of being taken in. You could see at once what they were like; a glance would save you any subsequent disappointment or surprises. And no one, it may be added at once, ever pricked his fingers over them. They were as kind as they were new. But since many strains of blood have gone to the making of each member of the human race, one strain prospering and predominating in this specimen while in another, though of the same blood, it scarcely shows a trace of existence, the divergence of type even in one generation is often very marked indeed. Thus, though Mr. Osborne felt that he both understood and admired his eldest son, his admiration for the younger was agreeably tempered with mystification. “Old Claude’s a rum fellow,” he often said, and Mrs. Osborne agreed with him. But, as will be seen, there was still much in common between Claude and them.

The house, like the ivy, was also new and solid and in point of fact none of its inhabitants, again with the curious exception of Claude, were quite used to it yet. This they concealed as far as they were able, but the concealment really went little further than the fact that they did not openly allude to it. They all agreed that the house was very handsome, and Mr. Osborne had a secret gratification not unmingled with occasional thrills of misgiving as to whether he had wasted his money in the knowledge of the frightful costliness of it. Outside, as has been said, it was of Gothic design; but if a guest thought that he was to pass his evening or listen to music in a Gothic interior, he would have been rudely undeceived. It had been unkindly said that you went through a Gothic door to find Vandals within, and if Vandalism includes the appropriation of beautiful things, the Vandalism exhibited here was very complete. But the destructive side of Vandalism had no counterpart; Mr. Osborne was very careful of his beautiful things and very proud of them. He admired them in proportion to their expensiveness, and having an excellent head for figures could remember how much all the more important pictures, articles of furniture, and tapestries had “stood him in.” And he ran no risk of forgetting these items, for he kept them green in his memory by often speaking of them to his guests.

“Yes,” he would say, “there’s three thousand pounds worth of seating accommodation in this very drawing-room, and they tell me ’twas lucky to have got the suite at that figure. All Louis—Louis—Per, my boy, did they tell us it was Louis XV. or XVI.? Sixteenth, yes, Louis XVI. Divide it up and you’ll find that it averages two hundred pounds a chair. Seems funny to sit on two hundred pounds, hey? Mrs. Osborne, she said a bright thing about that. ‘Sit firm then,’ she said and you’ll keep it safe.’”

The furnishing and appointments of the house had in fact been entrusted to a notable firm, which though it had certainly charged Mr. Osborne a great deal of money for what it supplied, had given him very good for his cheque, and both he and his wife, after they had got over the unusual feeling of sitting on two hundred pounds, and if you chose putting your feet up on another two hundred, were quite content that both the furniture of this Louis XVI. room for instance and the cheque for it, should be what they called a “little stiff.” It was the same in the Italian room that opened out of it, and matters were no better in the dining room, which was furnished with Chippendale. Here indeed a very dreadful accident had happened on the first evening that they had got into the house, now two months ago, for Mr. Osborne, alone with Percy his wife for that night, had drawn his chair up to the fire—the night being chilly—to drink his second and third glasses of port and had rested his feet on the pierced steel fender that guarded the hearth. This led to his tilting his Chippendale chair back on to its hind legs, which, designed to bear only half the weight of its occupant, had crashed into splinters and deposited Mr. Osborne on the floor and his second glass of port on his shirt front. But he had taken the incident with great good-humour.

“Live and learn,” he had said, “live and learn. Got to sit up and behave now, Maria. Per, my boy, don’t you finish all the port while your dad changes his shirt. Drink fair, for fair play’s a jewel, and fill your mother’s glass.”

Mr. Osborne would never have attained to the eminence he occupied as a manufacturer of hardware, had he not been a man of intelligence, and instead of upbraiding the furnishing firm for charging so high a price for a “four legs of carved dry rot” which a momentary irritation carefully kept to himself might have led him to do, drew the lesson that it was unwise to tilt chairs unless they were clearly tiltable. But this accident had caused him to insist on his own room, which he called his snuggery, being furnished as he chose and not as anybody else chose, and here he rejoiced in chairs of the pattern known as Chesterfield, a solid mahogany table, on which stood a telephone, and a broad firm mantel-shelf where he could put a box of cigars without fear of its overbalancing. On this point also, his wife had adopted a similar attitude and her own sitting room opening out of the white-furnished bedroom where she was afraid to touch anything for fear of “soiling” it, was thoroughly to her taste. As in her husband’s snuggery she had matters arranged for her own comfort and not for other people’s admiration. Percy had “done” the room for her, and sometimes when she came up here to look at her letters before going to bed, and drink the glass of hot water which was so excellent a digestive after the dinner that was still a little curious to her, she wondered whether Percy did not understand house furnishing better than the great French firm, the name of which she was always rather shy of pronouncing. She had asked him to choose all the furniture himself, remarking only that she was a little rheumatic, and found it difficult to get out of very low chairs. And he had succeeded to admiration, not only had he consulted her comfort, but he had divined and satisfied her taste. The paper of the walls was a pattern of ferns with iridescent lilies of the valley neatly disposed among them, so that it was almost a shame to hang pictures thereon; indeed it would have been quite a shame had not those pictures been so well selected. For Mrs. Osborne cared far more about the subject of a picture than the manner in which it was presented, and all the subjects were admirably chosen. There was a beautiful “view” of the church that Edward had built at Sheffield, a print of the Duke of Wellington in a garter and of Queen Victoria in a bonnet and a couple of large oil-paintings, one of the Land’s End and the other of Koynance Cove, both of which were intimately associated in her affectionate heart with her honeymoon. Edward and she had spent a month in Cornwall, staying at little inns and walking as much as possible to save expense, and though all that was thirty years ago, she never entered this room now without remembering how they had sat just on that very bluff above the emerald sea, and read the “Idylls of the King” together, and he had promised her, when they were rich enough, to give her an emerald necklace to remind her of the colour of the sea. It is true that those emeralds (which were remarkably fine) were not exactly of the tint that either nature had given to the sea, or the very vivid artist had reproduced in the painting that hung on the walls, but they still reminded both her and Edward of those enchanted weeks in Cornwall, and it was but seldom, when she wore her emeralds, that he did not say “Mrs. O. has got the Land’s End emeralds on to-night.”

Then, more often than not would follow the explanation of this cryptic remark, and the whispered information of how much the emeralds had cost. Mrs. Osborne, as a matter of fact, had overheard, again and again, what the figure was, but she was still officially ignorant of it, and generally closed the subject by saying, “Mr. Osborne won’t never tell me what he paid for them. I believe he got them cheap, and that’s why.”

But she secretly rejoiced to know that this was not the reason. The reason was just the opposite; they had been so enormously expensive. That expense would not be unreasonable now, but at the time, for she had worn the Land’s End necklace for twenty years, it had been preposterous. They had had no holiday one year in consequence, but had grilled in Sheffield throughout August and September. But during those months she had worn the emeralds every evening, and it had been a sort of renewal of the honeymoon. Though they had not been able to go away themselves, they had managed to send Percy and Claude to the seaside, and the two months in Sheffield, when every night she wore the emeralds which had been the cause of their remaining there, was still one of Mrs. Osborne’s most delightful memories, as a sort of renewed honeymoon. Since then times had considerably changed, and though to many the change from simplicity of life and not uncomfortable narrowness of means to the wider horizons which the rapid accumulation of an enormous fortune brings within the view, implies a loss of happiness rather than an extension of it, neither Edward nor she were of that Arcadian build. They both immensely enjoyed the wider horizon; the humble establishment with parlour maids had been all very well, but how much more enjoyable was the brownstone house on the outskirts of Sheffield with footmen and a carriage. For Mrs. Osborne did not find it in the least interfered with her happiness to have men to manage or “richer” things to eat. As a matter of fact she liked managing, and rejoiced in the building of a new wing to the brown stone house, in the acquisition of motor cars and in the drain on their time and resources by Edward being made Mayor of Sheffield. Neither of them ever thought that they had been happier when their means were more straitened and their establishment humbler. Both of them, in spite of an essential and innate simplicity of nature rejoiced in these establishments, and were always ready to enlarge and embellish and rejoice. They had always made the most of their current resources—though in a merely financial sense they had always saved—and it was as great a pleasure to Mrs. Osborne to see her table plentifully loaded with the most expensive food that money could provide, and press second helpings on her guests, as it had been to have a solid four courses at midday dinner on Sunday in Sheffield and tell her friends that Mr. Osborne liked nothing better than to have a good dinner on Sunday, and see a pleasant party to share it with him. She still inquired if she might not “tempt” her neighbours at table to have another quail, just as she had tried to persuade them to have a second cut of roast lamb, when in season, while from the other end of the table she would hear as a hospitable echo her husband’s voice recommending Veuve Clicquot of 1884, just as in the old days he had recommended the sound whiskey which would hurt nobody, not if you drank it all afternoon.

The year of the mayoralty of Sheffield had been succeeded by seven years fatter than even Joseph had dreamed of. Edward was as sound in his business as he was in the whiskey he so hospitably pressed on his guests, and by dint of always supplying goods of the best possible workmanship and material at prices that gave him no more than a respectable profit, the profits had annually increased till in the opinion of those who did not adopt so unspeculative a quality of goods, they had almost ceased to be respectable, and became colossal instead. Then, at the end of seven fat years, Edward had realized that he was sixty, though he neither looked nor felt more than an adolescent fifty, had turned the hardware business into a company, and as vendor had received ordinary shares to an extent that would insure him an income no less than that of the fat years. He had already put by a capital that produced some ten thousand pounds a year, and he was thus not disadvantageously situated. Percy, however, still held the Art Department in his own hands. The plant and profits of that had not been offered to the public, but had been presented to Percy by his father on the occasion of his marriage, an event now six years old. For the whole idea of ornamental tin ivy and the host of collateral ideas that emanated therefrom had been Percy’s and it was now a joke between his father and him that Mrs. P. would soon have an emerald necklace that would take the shine out of the Land’s End. “Land’s End will be Mrs. P.’s beginning,” said his father. “And the Sea is Britannia’s realm,” he added by a happy afterthought. “I’ll call her Mrs. C. instead of Mrs. P. Hey, Per?”

Badinage had ensued. She was called Mrs. C. instantly and there were numerous conjectures as to who C. was. Mr. Osborne said that it was curious that C. was the first letter of Co-respondent; but that joke, though Edward was usually very successful in such facetiæ, was not very well received. The momentary Mrs. C. ate her grapes with a studied air, and Mrs. Osborne from the other end of the table—this was still in Sheffield—said, “You don’t think, Eddie; you let your tongue run away with you.”

On reflection Eddie agreed with her, and there was no more heard about Mrs. C. But he always thought that his badinage had been taken a little too seriously. “A joke’s a joke,” he said to himself as he shaved his chin next morning, leaving side-whiskers. “But if they don’t like one joke, we’ll try another. Lots of jokes still left.”

So without sense of injury or of being misunderstood he tried plenty of others, which were as successful as humour should have any expectation of being. Humour comes from a well that is rarely found, but when found proves always to be inexhaustible. The numerical value, therefore, of Edward’s jokes had not been diminished and Percy inherited his father’s sense of fun.

Still in Sheffield, Mr. Osborne had, after the formation of the company, seen an extraordinary increase in business, with the result that his income, already scarcely respectable, mounted and mounted. Years ago he had built a chapel of corrugated iron outside and pitch-pine inside in the middle of that district of the town which had become his and was enstreeted with the houses of his workmen, and now he turned the corrugated building into a reading room, as soon as ever the tall Gothic church with which he had superseded it was ready for use. A princess had come to the opening of it, and had declared the discarded church to be a reading room, and there was really nothing more to do in Sheffield, except to say that he did not wish to become a knight. Mr. Osborne had no opinion of knights: knighthood in his mind was the bottom shelf of a structure, where, if he took a place, it might easily become a permanent one. But he had no idea of accepting a bottom place on the shelves. With his natural shrewdness he said that he had done nothing to deserve it. But he winked in a manner that anticipated familiarity toward shelves that were higher. He had not done with the question of shelves yet, though he had nothing to say to the lowest one.

It must not be supposed that because he had retired from active connection with the hardware business, his mind slackened. The exact contrary was the case. There was no longer any need for him to exercise that shrewd member on hardware, and it only followed that the thought he had previously given to hardware was directed into other channels. He thought things over very carefully as was his habit, before taking any step, summed up his work in Sheffield, settled that a knighthood was not adequate to reward him for what he had already done, but concluded that he had nothing more to do in Sheffield, just for the moment. And having come to that conclusion he had a long talk with Mrs. O. in her boudoir, where she always went after breakfast to see cook and write her letters. But that morning cook waited downstairs in her clean apron long after Mrs. Osborne had gone to her boudoir, expecting every moment to hear her bell, and no bell sounded. For more weighty matters were being debated than the question of dinner, and at first when Mr. Osborne broached the subject his wife felt struck of a heap.

“Well, Mrs. O., it’s for you to settle,” he said, “and if you’re satisfied to remain in Sheffield, why in Sheffield we remain, old lady, and that’s the last word you shall hear from me on the subject. But there’s a deal to be considered and I’ll just put the points before you again. There’s yourself to lead off with. You like seeing your friends at dinner and giving them of the best and so do I. Well, for all I can learn there’s a deal more of that going on in London where you can have your twenty people to dinner every night if you have a mind, and a hundred to dance to your fiddles afterward. And I’m much mistaken, should we agree to leave Sheffield and set up in town, if Mrs. O.’s parties don’t make some handsome paragraphs in the Morning Post before long.”

“Lor’, to think of that,” said Mrs. Osborne reflectively. She did not generally employ that interjection, which she thought rather common, and even now, though she was so absorbed, she corrected herself and said “There, to think of that.”

“But mind you, my dear,” continued Mr. Osborne, “if we go to town, and have a big house in the country, as per the scheme I’ve been putting before you, we don’t do it to take our ease, and just sit in a barouche and drive round the Park to fill up the time to luncheon. I shall have my work to do, and it’s you who must be helping me to get on, as you’ve always done, God bless you Maria, and fine and busy it will make you. There’s a county council in London as well as in Sheffield, and there’s a House of Parliament in London which there isn’t here. No, my dear, if we go to London it won’t be for a life of ease, for I expect work suits us both better, and there’s plenty of work left in us both yet. Give us ten years more work, and then if you like we’ll get into our Bath chairs, and comb out the fleece of the poodle, and think what a busy couple we are.”

Mr. Osborne got up and shuffled to the window in his carpet slippers. They had been worked and presented to him by his wife on his last birthday and this had been a great surprise, as she had told him throughout that they were destined for Percy. At this moment they suggested something to him.

“Look at me already, my dear!” he said. “What should I have thought ten years ago if I had seen myself here in your boudoir at eleven of the morning in carpet slippers instead of being at work in my shirt sleeves this last three hours. ‘Eddie,’ I should have said to myself, ‘you’re getting a fat, lazy old man with years of work in you yet.’ And, by Gad, Mrs. O., I should have been right. Give me a good dinner, but let me get an appetite for it, though, thank God, my appetite’s good enough yet.’ But let me feel I earn it.”

Mrs. Osborne got up from her davenport and came and stood by her husband in the window. In front of her stretched the broad immaculate gravel walk bordered by a long riband bed of lobelias, calceolarias and geraniums. Beyond that was the weedless tennis lawn, with its brand new net, where one of the very numerous gardeners was even now marking out the court with the machine that Mr. Osborne had invented and patented the year before he retired from entire control of his business, and which sold in ever increasing quantities. Below, the ground fell rapidly away and not half a mile off the long straggling rows of workmen’s houses between which ran cobbled roads and frequent electric trams, stretched unbroken into the town. Of late years it had grown very rapidly in the direction of this brown stone house, and with its growth the fogs and smoky vapours had increased so that it was seldom, as on this morning, that they could see from the windows the tall and very solid tower of the Gothic church that had supplanted the one of corrugated iron. He looked out over this with his wife’s hand in his for a moment in silence.

“I don’t know how it is with you, my dear,” he said, “but every now and then a feeling comes over me which I can’t account for or resist. And the feeling that’s been coming over me this last month agone, is that me and Sheffield’s done all the work we’re going to do together. But there are plenty of days of work for us both yet, but not together. Look at that there quarter, my dear, right from where the New Lane houses begin to where’s the big chimney of the works behind the church. I made that, as well you know, and it’s paid me well to do it, and it’s paid Sheffield to have me to do it. Not an ounce of bad material, to my knowledge, has gone into the factory gates, and not an ounce of bad workmanship has come out of them. I’ve paid high for first-class materials, and I seen that I got them. I’ve turned out none but honest goods what’ll do the work I guarantee them for, and last you ten times as long as inferior stuff, as you and cook know, since there’s not a pot or a pan in your kitchen, my dear, but what came from the shops. And I’ve made my fortune over it, and that’s over, so I take it, and what’s the sense of my sitting on top of a hill, just to look at my calceolarias and get an appetite for dinner by running about that court there? But if you’ve got a fancy for staying in Sheffield, as I say, this is the last word I speak on the subject.”

Mrs. Osborne nodded at him and pressed his arm, as he poured out these gratifying recollections in his rather hoarse voice.

“There’s more on your mind yet, Eddie, my dear,” she said. “Do you think I’ve lived with you these years and seen you off your victuals by day and heard you tossing and turning in your bed at night without getting to know when you’ve told me all, or when you’ve got something further unbeknown to me yet? It’s not me only you’re thinking of.”

Mr. Osborne beamed on his wife.

“Well, if you aren’t right every time,” he said. “You’ve guessed it all I reckon. Yes, it’s Claude. I doubt whether I didn’t make a mistake about Claude at the beginning, and whether we shouldn’t have done better to put him into the business like Percy, and let Alfred leave him his money or not just as he liked. But there, if we made a mistake, it’s our business to make the best we can of it now. But whenever I see the boy I think we did the right thing by him, and we’ve got to go on doing the right thing. And if a young fellow has been to Eton and Cambridge, and is going to be as rich a man and richer nor his father was, without having to do a stroke of work for it, I ask you, Mrs. O., what’s he to do with himself in Sheffield? Of course, he could go to London and work at the law or go into the Army or adopt any other of the ways of wasting time and doing nothing, without having it cast up at you, but think of the chance he gets, if you and I settle in London and have a country house as well, so that he can ask his friends down for a bit of shooting or whatever’s on, and bring them home to dine, and stop for his mother’s dance or concert, or whatever you have named for such a day.”

He paused a moment.

“He’ll be home for good now in a month’s time, and I should like to be able to say to him, ‘Claude, my boy, there’s no need for you to think how you’ll occupy yourself in Sheffield for your vacation, for we’ll soon be moving on. Mother and I’—that’s what I shall say—you understand—‘have come to an agreement, and there’ll be a house for you in Grosvenor Square, perhaps, or in Park Lane to bring your friends to, and a shooting box somewhere else, so that whether it’s Lord This or the Honourable That, you can bring them down and find a welcome, and a bird or two to shoot at, and the pick of the London girls for you to dance with.’”

“Eh, Edward, you talk as if the thing was done,” said his wife.

“Well, so it is, if you and I make up our minds to it. And you guessed right; it’s a particular feeling I’ve always had about Claude. Eton and Cambridge may have made a change in him, or it may be that he was something different all along. But to see him come into a room, into that smoking room for instance at the Club. Why, it’s as if the whole place belonged to him, it is, if only he cared to claim it. And the very waiters know the difference: and I warrant you there’s always an evening paper ready for him, whoever has to go without. But in London he’ll find friends, yes, and a girl to marry him, I wager you, whose folk came over with the Conqueror. Maria, I should like to speak of my son-in-law the Earl, or the Countess my boy’s mother-in-law. There’s a deal in a name if you can get hold of the right one.”

Mrs. Osborne gave a great sigh, and looked at her rings, and as she sighed the row of pearls that hung over her ample bosom rose and fell. There was a great deal in what Edward had said, and that which concerned Claude appealed to her most. She had felt it all again and again, and again and again she had wished, content though she was with the very comfortable circumstances of her life, that they had some other house in which to welcome him home for his vacation. She felt he was her own son at heart, but his manners were such! It was Claude all over to behave as if the whole room belonged to him, should he choose to claim it. She was devoted to Percy, but Percy, she well knew, felt as she did when he was going out to dinner, and thought about what he should say, and looked to see if his hair was tidy, and hoped he hadn’t left his handkerchief behind. But Claude seemed to know that everything was all right, with him, or if it wasn’t he didn’t care. Once on a solemn occasion, when a Royal visitor was in Sheffield, the whole family had been bidden to lunch with the mayor, and Claude had discovered in the middle of lunch that he hadn’t got a pocket-handkerchief, and the day was enough to make anybody persp——. And then in thought Mrs. Osborne checked again, and said to herself “action of the skin.” But Claude, though hot, had been as cool as a cucumber. He just stopped a waiter who was going by and said, “Please send out to the nearest shop and get me a handkerchief.” Mrs. Osborne would never have dared to do that, and if she had, she felt that the handkerchief wouldn’t have come. But in five minutes Claude had his, “and never paid for it neither,” thought Mr. Osborne to himself in a mixed outburst of pride and misgiving. Claude wanted a handkerchief and it came. He didn’t bother about it.

But the whole suggestion of giving up Sheffield where she was so friendly and pleasant with so many local magnates and their wives, and launching into the dim unplumbed sea of London was bewildering though exciting. She had no doubts about Edward; wherever Edward was he would do his part; she was only doubtful about her own. And these doubts were not of durable quality, while the reflections about Claude were durable in texture. Once a friend of Claude’s at Cambridge had come to stay at the brown stone house, and it had all been very awkward. He was an honourable, too, and his father was a lord, and though he was very quiet and polite, Mrs. Osborne had seen that something was wrong from the first. The most carefully planned dinners had been offered him, and Edward had brought out the Chateau Yquem, which was rarely touched, and this young man had eaten and drunk as if “it was nothing particular.” Mrs. Osborne had tried to console herself with the thought that he didn’t think much of his victuals, whatever they were, but it was not that he refused dishes. He just ate them all, and said no more about it. And he had been regaled with two dinner parties during the three days he was with them, to which all sorts of Aldermen and their wives and daughters had been bidden. She had not forgotten his rank either, for though there were two knights and their wives present at one of these dinners, and at the other two knights and a baronet, he had taken her in on both occasions. Nor was their conversation wholly satisfactory, for though Mrs. Osborne had the Morning Post brought up to her room with her early tea, while the young man was there, in order that she might be up to date with the movements and doings of the nobility, she had extraordinarily bad luck, since the bankruptcy case that was going on was concerned with the affairs of his sister and her husband, and the memorial service at St. James’s proved to be coincident with the obsequies of his great-uncle. Mrs. Osborne felt that these things would not happen when they were in the midst of everything in town.

So the momentous decision had been made and two strenuous years had followed, during which time Mr. Osborne had settled to adopt (as became a man of property in these Socialistic days) the Conservative cause in politics, and after one defeat to get himself returned for one of the divisions of Surrey. During that time, too, No. 92 Park Lane had been pulled down and by amalgamation with No. 93, been built up again in a style that enabled Mrs. O. to have her friends to dine, with a bit of a dance afterward or Caruso to sing, without it being necessary for late comers to huddle together on the stairs where they could not hear a note, or stand in the doorway of the ballroom without being able to get in, or to dance if they did. And though, as has been stated, the years had been strenuous and the struggle continuous, neither Mrs. Osborne nor her husband ever felt that it was a losing game that they were playing. Apart from this one defeat in the Conservative interest, and one dismal attempt at a dance in the house that they had taken before No. 92 was ready, to which eight men came (all told and counting Percy) they had swiftly and steadily mounted. For true to the principles on which her husband had amassed so large a fortune, all that Mrs. Osborne offered was of the very best, or at any rate of the sort which momentarily most attracted. The singer who was most in vogue sang at her concerts, or the heels that were most admired danced there, and beyond doubt the extreme pleasure that the excellent woman took in her own hospitality contributed largely to its success. She was no careworn anxious-eyed hostess, but bubbled with good-humour, was genuinely glad to see the world fill her rooms, and always welcomed the suggestion that any guest should bring a friend, whose name was instantly entered by her admirable secretary on her visiting list.

And thus she rose and prospered, till on the date at which this story opens, she had crowned the work of her season by giving this immense fancy-dress ball, which, to give it its due, had whipped up again to full activity the rather moribund energies of the season. Somehow the idea had taken on at once; there had been no fancy-dress function of any importance that season, and by one of those whims that govern the flow and ebb of the social world, London had thrown itself with avidity into the notion. It was soon clear that everyone would be there, and everyone was, and at last in her own house Mrs. Osborne heard the strains of the National Anthem.

It had been of no particular period; the point was not to have a strict and classical function but any amount of jewels and fine dresses, and Queens of Sheba, Cleopatras and Marie Antoinettes joined hands in the quadrille with Napoleon, Piers Gaveston and Henry VIII. She herself had been an admirable Mistress Page, her husband a veritable merry knight. But of all the brilliant figures in that motley crowd there was none perhaps more admired than the slim dark Piers Gaveston. And that was Claude.

CHAPTER II.

DORA WEST was trimming her hat. It was a straw hat that had cost a shilling or two when it came into her deft hands, and the trimming would only prove to have cost a shilling or two when it became attached to the hat, and leaving the deft hands was put onto her extremely pretty head. But by that time the hat would certainly have become a very pretty hat. This she was explaining with great volubility to her friend.

“You are rich, darling May,” she said, “and in consequence your attitude toward hats is a little opulent and vulgar. I can put the feathers and the flags and the birds’ eggs in exactly the same place as Biondinetti, or whoever it is who sells you hats.”

“No, not exactly,” said Mary, with the quietness that real conviction brings. She was quite certain about that point, and so did not care to shout over it. It is only when people are not certain about what they say, that they drown their want of conviction in arguments. Conviction always swims.

Dora had several pins in her mouth, and so did not reply at once. In itself the pin-reason was excellent, and more excellent was the fact that she did not wish to reply, knowing the quiet truth of Mary’s conviction, especially since she could not settle the exact angle at which a very large white feather should be put. It pierced the hat, once inward once outward, that was Biondinetti all over, but where in heaven’s name ought it to start from? So she only made a little impatient noise with her lips, and even that was difficult, since there was a danger of causing a pin to be sucked into her mouth. But she made it successfully. She poised the feather a moment, focussing its appearance against the hat. The effect produced by the impatient noise was sufficient to ensure her against any immediate reply. Then suddenly the inspiration came, and with a pair of tiny scissors she cut a strand or two in the straw and stuck the quill feather through the holes.

“There,” she said, “and you pay Biondinetti two guineas for doing that. I can’t, and I wouldn’t if I could. Austell wrote to me last week and said the swans were moulting, and I telegraphed—that cost sixpence and a little thought, instead of two guineas—to tell him to send me big wing feathers. He’s a dreadful ass; we all know that, but he had the sense to see I wanted feathers, and to catch a swan and pluck——”

“What a disgusting butcher,” said May. “I don’t mean butcher, I mean vivisectionist.”

“And how do you think you get your feathers, darling?” asked Dora.

“I don’t know; I never ask. The hat comes from the shop.”

“Then don’t ask now, because I will tell you. Your horrid shop has birds killed, and then plucks them. It does; you can’t deny it. Whereas with me the swan was just moulting, and Austell assisted Nature, which we all do. He caught its head in a landing-net and it tried to peck, he says——”

Dora West stopped suddenly in the middle of these surprising remarks, and held out the hat at arm’s length in order to observe the effect of the feather. She had one of those enchanting faces that are overwhelmingly pretty for no particular reason. You could, if you chose, argue her prettiness away, by maintaining with justification that no single feature on it had warrantable claims. They were all passable, it is true, but it was not clear how it came about that the sum of them was so delicious. Her eyes were gray, and had nothing striking to recommend them, her nose turned up at the tip far too markedly to be able to claim beauty, and the mouth was quite certainly too large. Yet even allowing for the charm of her extreme youth and the vigour and vividness of her vitality, there was no accounting for the supreme prettiness that was there. So the sensible thing was to stop arguing and look at it again, and more sensible yet, to say something that should make her laugh. For her laugh was the most enchanting thing of all; then every feature laughed, there was no telling where it began or where it ended. May before now had declared that from quite a distance off, when Dora’s back was turned, she had in a ballroom seen she was amused because the back of her neck and her shoulders were laughing so much. “Oh, Nature wants a lot of assistance,” she went on. “She is perfectly hopeless if you leave her to herself. Look at the flowers even, which are quite the nicest thing she does. Roses, for instance; all she could think of in the way of roses was the ordinary wild dog rose. I don’t say it is bad, but how paltry, if you have had simply millions of years to invent roses in. Then man comes along, who is the only really unnatural being, and in quite a few years invents all the heavenly roses which we see now. Of course Nature did it, in a sense, but she did it with his assistance.”

“But why do you call man unnatural?” asked May.

“Why? Because he saw at once how stupid Nature was, and had to invent all the things that make life tolerable. He lit fires, and built houses, and made laws, and motor-cars, and shops, and—and boats and button hooks. Motor-cars, too; all that Nature could think of in the way of locomotion was horses.”

The feathers were inserted in absolutely the right place, and Dora breathed a heavy sigh of satisfaction, laid the hat down on the end of the sofa, hovered over the tea table for a moment, and selected an enormous bun.

“And Nature gives us brains,” she continued, with her mouth full, “and the moment we begin to use them, as I have been doing over that hat, which is Biondinetti, she decrees that we shall be so hungry that we have to stop and eat instead. The same with talking: she gives us a tongue to talk with and after quite a few minutes, talking makes us hungry too, and we have to use our tongue to help us to swallow. Did you know you swallowed with your tongue, darling? I never did till yesterday. I thought I swallowed with my throat, but apparently the tongue helps. That’s why we can’t talk with our mouths full as I am doing.”

May Thurston looked at the hat on the end of the sofa for a while, and then transferred her gaze to her friend.

“I don’t think I agree with you,” she said. “At least I allow that many people don’t know what being natural means, but I think all the nicest people are natural. You, for instance, and me and Mrs. Osborne last night at her dance. Never before have I seen a hostess really enjoying herself at her own ball. She stood at the top of the stairs and beamed, she danced and beamed——”

“And never before have you seen a person like Mrs. Osborne dance,” remarked Dora.

“Well, not often. Anyhow, she enjoyed herself tremendously and was perfectly natural.”

Dora shook her head.

“It won’t do, darling,” she said. “I allow that Mrs. Osborne beamed all the time and enjoyed herself enormously. But why? Because everybody was there. Was she ever so much pleased at Sheffield, do you suppose, or wherever it was they came from? I am sure she was not. But last night she was pleased because every duchess and marchioness who counts at all was there, as well as heaps that don’t count at all. She’s a snob: probably the finest ever seen, and by what process of reasoning you arrive at the fact that a snob is natural is beyond me. I agree that heaps of nice people are snobs, but snobbishness is in itself the most artificial quality of an artificial age. Snobs are the crowning and passionate protest against Nature——”

“Oh well,” said May in deprecation of this rather lengthy harangue, “I didn’t mean to rouse you, Dora.”

“I daresay not, and in that case you have done so without meaning. But really, when you say that Mrs. Osborne is natural I am bound to protest. You might as well say that your mother is.”

“Oh no, I mightn’t,” said May quite calmly. “It would be simply silly to call mother natural. She only does things because they are ‘the thing.’ She spends her whole life in doing ‘the thing.’ And yet I don’t know—oh, Dora, what very odd people women are when they grow up! Shall you and I be as odd, do you think? I love mother, and so do you, and we both of us love yours, don’t we? but they are very, very odd people.”

Dora gave a little shriek of laughter.

“Oh don’t,” she said. “I want to talk about snobs a little more.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ve often told me that mother was one,” remarked May.

“Yes, the darling; she is, isn’t she? She is the most delicious sort of snob. A month ago she wouldn’t know the Osbornes, and merely said, ‘I have no doubt they are very honest people,’ with her nose at the same angle toward earth as is the Matterhorn; while a week ago she was clamouring for an invitation to the dance last night. In the interval it had become ‘the thing’ to know the Osbornes. My mother saw it was going to be ‘the thing’ to know them long ago, and called at Park Lane almost before they had washed the white blobs of paint off the windows, or hung up those shields of heraldic glass on the stairs——”

“Oh, no, is there heraldic glass on the stairs?” asked May, in a slightly awe-struck tone. “I never saw it.”

Dora, as her friend often declared, really did not always play fair. There had quite distinctly been the satirical note in her own allusion to the heraldic glass, but as soon as May reflected that in the appreciative reverence of her reply, Dora was down upon her at once.

“And why shouldn’t they have heraldic glass as much as your people or mine?” she asked smartly. “They’ve got exactly as many grandfathers and grandmothers as we have, and there’s not the slightest reason to doubt that Mrs. Osborne was a Miss Parkins, and Mr. Parkins’s heir, who, I expect, was far more respectable than my mother’s father, who drank himself to death, though mother always calls it cerebral hæmorrhage. Oh, May, we are all snobs, and I’m not sure the worst snobbishness of all isn’t shown by those who say they came over with William the Conqueror or were descended from Edward the Fourth. Probably the Osbornes didn’t come over with William the Conqueror but were here long before, only they don’t happen to know who they were.”

“I know, that is just it,” said May, calmly. “They don’t know who they were, and yet they put up their coats of arms.”

Dora looked at her friend in contempt.

“I suppose you think you have scored over that,” she said.

“Not in the least. I am only pointing out perfectly obvious things.”

“Then why do it?” said Dora. “What I am pointing out are not perfectly obvious things. At least they appear not to be to you. The whole affair is a game, stars and garters and ancestors, and coats of arms is all a game. Oh, I don’t say that it isn’t great fun. But it is absurd to take it seriously. What can it matter to you or me whether great-grandpapa was a peer or a bootblack? It only amuses us to think that he was a peer. And if it amuses Mrs. Osborne to think that Mr. Parkins had a coat of arms at all, why shouldn’t she put it up in the hall window? And since, as I said, she was the only child, of course she quarters with the Osborne arms. It’s one of the rules. I believe you are jealous of them, because they are richer than your horrid family.”

Nothing ever roused May except a practical assault upon her personal comfort, and Dora seldom attempted to rouse her. It was invariably hopeless and the present attempt only added another to the list of her failures.

“I think that is partly true,” said May. “I don’t see why common people should have the best of everything. They only have to invent a button or a razor, and all that life offers is theirs. I think it’s deplorable, but it doesn’t make me angry any more than a wet day makes me angry, unless I am absolutely caught in the rain with a new hat. As to coats of arms and things, I think it is rather pleasant to know that one’s grandfather was a gentleman.”

Dora waved her arms wildly.

“But he probably wasn’t!” she screamed. “Mine wasn’t, he was the wicked one, you know, and did awful things. Much worse than Mrs. Osborne’s probably ever dreamed of. Mrs. Osborne’s great-grandfather would certainly have cut mine, if he had had the chance——”

“He wouldn’t have had the chance,” remarked May. “And also Mrs. Osborne herself would cut nobody, who would—would lend lustre to her house. Oh, Dora, let’s stop. It isn’t any good. You are a democrat, and a radical and a socialist, and really it doesn’t matter. Besides I haven’t seen you for—oh, well, nearly twenty-four hours. What has happened?”

Dora got up.

“I don’t think I can stop,” she said. “Because I want to know what you really think about certain things. Two heads are better than one, you know, even when mine is one of them. Oh, by the way, Austell has let Grote to the Osbornes. They have taken it for seven years from the end of July. It was mother’s doing I think. I—oh, May, you may call me a radical and a socialist and anything else you choose, but I can’t quite see Mrs. Osborne there. She’ll fill it with plush. I know she will. After all, I expect mother is right. I suppose it is better to pay some of your debts, and have other people putting plush monkeys into your house than go on as Austell has been doing. I expect I should be just the same if he was my son instead of my brother. It doesn’t seem to matter much what one’s brother does, as long as he doesn’t wear his hair long, or cheat at cards. But I daresay it’s different if he’s your son.”

Dora gave a great sigh, and was silent. In spite of that series of statements which had led May Thurston, quite reasonably, to call her a radical and a socialist, there was some feeling within her, rather more intimate, rather more herself, that made her dislike the idea of the Osbornes living in Grote, which had always been her home. The Austell finances, especially for the past two or three years, had been precarious, and though her mother had a jointure that would enable her and Dora to live quite comfortably in her house in Eaton Place, and at the little bungalow at Deal, it had been necessary before now to let the house in Eaton Place during the months of the season, and live at Deal, and to let the bungalow at Deal (it was of the more spacious sort) during August and September, and encamp, so to speak, in a corner of Grote. For Jim Austell, her brother, it could not be denied, was not a person who could possibly be described as dependable. His mother had made the most prolonged attempt to describe him as such, but without success, and she had at length seen the futility of clinging to Grote, a huge Jacobean mansion with an enormous park. In the latter, being of sandy soil, a public golf links had been started, which brought in £192 a year, while neighbouring farmers grazed their beasts on other portions. The total receipts, however, about paid for the flower beds and the trimming of the exquisite bank of rhododendrons that grew round the lake, and after a year or so of trial, the scheme had been pronounced financially unsound, and for the last six months the place had been in search of a tenant. Austell had hoped that his well-known skill at bridge and his knowledge of horses might save him from the extremity of letting it. In this he had been disappointed; they had but contributed to the speed at which it was necessary to do so.

All this, which was part of the habitual environment of Dora’s mind, part of the data under which she lived, passed through it or was presented to it, like a familiar picture, in the space of the sigh that concluded her last speech. It was no longer any use thinking about these things; Grote had been let to the Osbornes, the bungalow at Deal had also been let for August, and till September she and her mother were going to “live in their boxes.” After all, they had done that, as everybody else had, often before, and for much longer periods than one month, but it was the first time that they had been compelled to live in their boxes with no house (except Eaton Place in August) to flee unto. And, at this moment the change struck Dora. For week after week before now, she had stayed with friends, knowing (though not thinking of it) that all the time there was home behind it all. True, now that Grote had been let, it would have been possible to live in the bungalow at Deal, but the latter had been let while the former was still uncertain, and Dora suddenly felt a sense of homelessness that was not quite comfortable. In two weeks from now they went to the Thurstons, then there were three more visits, then, no doubt, if they chose, many more visits, but there was nothing behind; there was no home. Meantime, the Osbornes grabbed homes wherever they chose, they built a palace in Park Lane, they took Grote from her own impecunious family, and as Mrs. Osborne had told her mother last night, Mr. O. had a fancy for a bit of stalking for self and friends in the autumn, and had taken a little box up in Sutherland. She, however, was going to settle down at Grote at the end of the season, and did not intend to go North. There had been badinage over this, it appeared, between her and Mr. O.; and he threatened her with an action for divorce on the grounds of desertion. And Dora felt much less socialistic and far more inclined to agree with May on the iniquity of common people having all they wanted simply because they invented a button. If only she could invent a button.

Dora, as has already been seen, was apt to be slightly discursive. She had one of those effervescent minds to which every topic as it comes on the board instantly suggests another, and in half a dozen sentences she was apt to speak of half a dozen totally different things, each in turn being swiftly abandoned for some fresh and more absorbing topic which each opened up. She had begun a moment before with telling May that she wanted her advice, and before that was asked or offered, before indeed, the subject on which it was desired was so much as mentioned, she had darted away afresh, poising, dragon-fly fashion, in the direction of Grote, and the letting of it to the Osbornes. The Osbornes indeed had been the connecting link, and now she went straight back via the Osbornes to the point from which she had started.

“Yes, I want your advice May,” she repeated, “or I think I do. It’s quite serious, at least it’s beginning to be quite serious, and there are so many dreadfully funny things connected with it. Yes, Mr. Osborne has asked leave to call upon mother this afternoon at six, and it’s half-past five now. Oh, dear, oh, dear! I suppose he found out in a book that that sort of thing was done a hundred years ago, and he wishes to be correct. The Osbornes are absolutely correct if you think of it. Every one went in to supper in the right order last night, which never happens at any other house I have ever been to, and where does he get those extraordinary good looks from? Oh, I don’t mean Mr. Osborne. How can you be so silly—but him. Yes, I’m telling it all very clearly, aren’t I, so I hope you understand. Perhaps Mrs. Osborne was a beauty once, you can’t tell.”

That May perfectly understood this extraordinary farrago of observations said less for her powers of perspicacity than might have been supposed, for Dora was not alluding to any new thing, but to a subject that had often before been mentioned between them. And Dora went on, still discursively but intelligibly.

“It’s coming to the crisis, you see,” she said. “Mr. Osborne’s call on mother is of a formal nature. He is going to ask permission for Claude to pay his addresses to me. He will use those very words, unless mother says ‘yes’ before he gets so far. And then I shall have to make up my mind. At least I’m not sure that I shall; I believe it’s made up already. And yet I can’t be sure. May, I feel just like a silly sentimental girl in an impossible feuilleton. He thrills me, isn’t it awful? But he does. Thrills! I don’t believe any boy was ever so good-looking. And then suddenly in the middle of my thrill, it all stops with a jerk, just because he says that somebody is a very ‘handsome lady.’ Why shouldn’t he say ‘handsome lady’? He said he thought mother was such a handsome lady, and I nearly groaned out loud. And then I looked at him again or something, and I didn’t care what he said. And he’s nice too. I know he’s nice, and he’s got excellent manners, and always gets up when a lady, handsome or not, comes into the room, instead of lounging in his chair as Austell does and all other young men nowadays except a few like Claude who aren’t exactly our sort. And he’s kind and he’s good. Am I in love with him? For heaven’s sake, tell me.”

Dora paused a moment and then took a cigarette from a box that stood on the mantelpiece, and lit it. She never smoked cigarettes; she only lit them, and the mere fact that she lit one was indicative of extreme absorption in something else.

“You’re engaged, May,” she said, “so you ought to know. Else what is the use of your being engaged. What do you feel when that angel Harry comes into the room?”

May could answer that quite easily.

“Oh, I feel as if it was me coming into the room,” she said. “I feel as if I am not in the room, since you put it like that, unless he is.”

The conversation had been flippant enough up till this moment, though, as a matter of fact, Dora, being inconsequential by nature, often gave the note of flippancy, when she was in earnest. Both of the girls, in any case, were quite serious now. And out of the depth of her twenty years’ wisdom, May proceeded to draw a bucket full for Dora, who was only nineteen.

“Oh, I expect you are in love,” she said. “At least I expect you are feeling as if you were. I understand perfectly about the thrill, though it sounds so dreadfully Family Herald when it is said. But one does thrill. I believe that thrill is a pretty good guide. I don’t usually thrill, in fact I never had thrilled till I saw Harry. But I always thrill at him. I suppose all girls feel the same when they fall in love. I suppose people on bank holidays thrill when they change hats, or eat winkles. We are all common then. At least you may call it common if you choose. I don’t see why you should. It’s IT.”

“You haven’t told me about me,” remarked Dora.

May Thurston shifted her position slightly. It was not done with any idea of manœuvre. She was the least dramatic of girls, and she only shifted because she felt a little uncomfortable. It was new to her also to take the lead. Dora usually strode ahead.

“I can’t advise you about things of that sort,” she said. “I’m old-fashioned, you see——”

“Oh, are you, darling?” murmured Dora. “Nobody would have guessed it.”

“But I am over things like that, old-fashioned and romantic. I think love in a cottage would be quite ideal, not because a cottage is ideal—I would much sooner not live in one—but because love is. And, oh, Dora, I can just advise you not to marry him unless you are in love with him. I daresay heaps of girls make very nice sensible marriages, where there’s lots of money, and where they each like the other, but you do miss such a lot by not falling in love. You miss—you miss it all.”

Dora scrutinized her friend for a moment, her head a little on one side, with something of the manner of a bright-eyed thrush listening for the movement of the worm that it hopes to breakfast on.

“But there’s something in your mind, which you are not saying, May,” she remarked. “I can hear it rustling.”

“Yes. There are just two little things that make me wonder whether you are in love with him. The first is you said you were sure he was good! That is no reason at all. You don’t fall in love with a person because he’s good. You esteem and like him—or it’s possible to conceive doing so—because he’s good, but you don’t love him for that reason.”

Dora gave a little purr of laughter.

“Oh, May, you are heavenly,” she said. “But surely it’s an advantage if your promesso is good.”

“Oh, certainly, but nobody in love stops to think about that.”

“I see. Well, what is the second thing that makes you wonder?”

May looked at her with her large, serious blue eyes.

“What you said about being brought up with a jerk in the middle of your thrill, when he spoke of a handsome lady. As if it mattered! Yet somehow it does to you, or it would not bring you up with a jerk!”

“And you think it doesn’t matter?” asked Dora.

“Of course not if you love him, and if you don’t, in the name of all that is sensible, don’t marry him. That sort of marriage is called sensible, I know. It is really the wildest and most awful risk.”

Dora stared.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“Of course I know, simply because I’m in love with Harry. Fancy being tied to a man for life without that! Gracious, it’s nearly six, and he was to call for me at home at six.”

“Oh, you can keep him waiting ten minutes,” said Dora. “We’ve only just begun to talk about the great point.”

May shook her head.

“I could keep him waiting,” she said, “but I couldn’t keep myself. I must go. Darling, I long to hear more, only you see I can’t stop now. Come and see me to-morrow morning. I shall be in till lunch time.”

Dora shrugged her shoulders, not in the least naturally but of design.

“I think it’s a pity to fall in love then, if it makes one so selfish,” she remarked.

“No doubt you are right, darling. Good-bye,” said May.

It was, as May had said, close on six, and in anticipation of Mr. Osborne’s arrival, Dora removed herself from the little fore-and-aft drawing room which looked out in front through two windows on to Eaton Place, and at the back through one on to the little square yard behind the house, and went upstairs to her bedroom, taking the hat with one swan feather fixed in it and the other still unplaced, with her. But even the hat, though in this extraordinarily interesting condition with regard to its trimming, failed at the moment to make good any footing in her mind. It was not that hats were less interesting than before (especially to the maker and wearer) but that during this last month something else had grown infinitely more interesting than anything else had ever been; the standard of interest possible in this world which Dora found so full of enchanting things, had been immeasurably raised. Life hitherto had been brilliantly full of surface brightnesses, but it seemed to her now as if life, the sunlike spirit of life, which shone with so continuous a lustre on her, struck the surface of herself no longer, but penetrated down into depths that she had not yet dreamed of. There, in those depths, so it seemed to her, she sat now, while on the surface, so to speak, there floated all the pleasant and humorous and friendly things of life. The hat she held in her hand floated there, dogs swam about there and flowers sparkled, May Thurston was there and friends innumerable. But as in the exquisite picture of the birth of Eve by Watts, a big photograph of which hung over her bed, it was as if all these were but a skin, a rind which even now was peeling off her, showing beneath the form and the wonder of the woman herself.

She sat in the window seat, and the hot air of the tired afternoon streamed slowly and gently in, just lifting and letting lie again the bright brown of her hair. Outside the hundred noises of the busy town mingled and melted together, and seemed to her to form, even as the blending of all colours forms the apparently colourless white, a general hush and absence of noise. Rousing herself for a moment, and consciously listening, she could detect and name the ingredients of it; there was the sharp clip of horses’ hoofs, the whirr of motors, the chiding of swifts, the agitated chirp of sparrows over some doubtful treasure of the roadway, the tapping of heels on the hot pavement, the cool whisper of cleansing from a water cart, and the noise of news being cried round the corner. But all these were blended together and formed not confused noise but quietness, and from the quietness of her face, and the immobility of her hands which were usually so active, you might have guessed that she was tired or bored, and found this hour pass heavily. But a second glance would have erased so erroneous an impression: there was a smouldering brightness in her eye, and ever and again a little trembling at the corners of her mouth which might develop into a smile, or, equally easily almost, be the precursor of flooded eyes.

For the last month now she had had moods like this, when she dived down from the froth and effervescence of her surface mind and sat below in deep and remote waters. It was not that she had lost the power of living on the surface, for this afternoon with her friend she had been quite completely there, until toward the end of their talk she had felt that she was being beckoned down again and knew that when May left her she would sink into these depths that till lately she had not known existed. Yet the path that had led to them had been quite natural; all her life she had above all things loved beauty, whether of waves or birds or sunsets, or human beings. Thus it was without any sense of a strange or unusual thing happening to her that she had admired frankly and naturally the dark merry face of this young man. He had taken her into dinner once or twice; he had danced with her a half dozen times. And then, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, he belonged to the surface of things no longer as far as she was concerned. Something smote at her heart, and the flowers and birds peeled away like rind as from Eve when she was born, and the woman shone within.

And indeed, there was little in all this to wonder at, for in spite of crabbed and cynical proverbs about beauty being only skin-deep, it remains and will remain to those who have eyes themselves, the wand of the enchanter. No doubt the enchantment can be made without the wand, but when eyes are keen, and blood is young, how vastly more easily is the enchantment effected with the aid of that weapon. And Claude to her thinking, before ever she even wondered if she was falling in love with him, was certainly not without the wand. He was dark, a potent colour to her who was so fair; hair nearly black grew low and crisp on the forehead, and eyebrows quite black met above his brown eyes. Then came the lean, smooth oval of his face, a mouth rather full-lipped, and a squarish chin. Often before he spoke, especially if he had, as not infrequently happened, some rather determined remark to make, he jerked his head a little back and put out his chin. It was a gesture of extraordinary decision, and “oh,” said Dora to herself now, as she thought of it, “I do like a man to know his mind.”

The same signs of knowing his mind were visible, too, in his movements. He never strayed about a room, or leaned against anything. If he purposed to stand up, up he stood; if he wished for support he sat down. But as far as Dora had seen, he seldom wished for support; those rather long slim limbs and boyish figure appeared remarkably capable of supporting themselves. He moved quickly and with a certain neatness that was attractive; once—these tiny details were important in making up her impression of him—she had seen him strike a match in a windy place to light his cigarette; one quick stroke had kindled it and his thin brown fingers made a cavern for it, in which it burned unwaveringly as in a room. And he could dance, really dance, not slide about in a crowded ballroom with an avoidance of collision which was really magical, and without—doubtless these things were all of the surface, but they caused the whole image to sink down with her into those depths—without having to mop his face when they stopped, which in general was not before the music stopped.

Suddenly, from the combined quietness of the noises outside, a sound detached itself and made itself very clear to her ear. It was a motor just preparing to start somewhere close below her in the street, and Dora, feeling instinctively, somehow, that this was significant to her, got up and leaned out of the window. Her instinct was correct enough; a big, short, broad man with an extremely shiny top-hat was just stepping into the big Napier car that stood at her mother’s door. Even as she looked out the chauffeur nipped into his place again, and in answer to the footman’s inquiry she heard Mr. Osborne say “‘Ome” quite distinctly. Then he lifted his shiny hat and carefully wiped the top of his bald head. Upon which Dora had, no doubt in reaction from her really serious half hour of thought, a slight fit of the giggles.

But the giggles soon stopped; they were but of the nature of coming to the surface to breathe, and she was already beginning to sink back toward the depths again, when there came a tap at her door, and her mother entered.

Lady Austell was very tall, and one felt at once that there was not the slightest doubt that she was not a countess; it seemed somehow far too suitable a thing to have really occurred. But in the endless surprises of this world, in which everything unconjecturable happens, and everyone is what he should not be, the ideally fit thing had occurred, and a countess she was in spite of the obviousness of the fact that she must be. That she was dowager was no less easy a guess, for though eighteen years had elapsed since her husband’s death, there was something about her dress, a little strip of crape insertion in the violet of her gown, it may be, or the absence of any jewels except an amethyst cross, or at other times a cap very Dutch and becoming with a ribbon of black in it that sat loosely on her abundant hair, that suggested, though it did not notify, widowhood. These insignia, it must be noted, she did not wear simultaneously, but there was never a day on which one at least of them, or others like them, was not present. No doubt also her manner gave confirmation to the impression conveyed by her dress, for it was one from which all exuberance had departed, though it suggested and reminded you (like a clear sunset) that a brilliant day had preceded it. Her voice also was rather faint and regretful, the voice of a widow with an unsatisfactory son and an unmarried daughter. But those who knew her best had in their minds the very distinct knowledge that it was difficult if not impossible to silence that faint voice, or make it say anything different to what it had already said. Lady Austell, when her views were in conflict with those of others, never said very much, but she never changed her tune, nor indeed ceased faintly chanting it, until the opposition had been borne down by her quiet persistence. As for the regretfulness of which her gentle accents were full, it may have been composed of grief for the fact that others, not she, would eventually be obliged to yield.

It will be seen, therefore, that Theresa Austell was an instance the more of the undoubted fact that people as well as things are not what they seem. She seemed, until you knew her quite well, to live uncomplainingly but regretfully among the memories of dead and happier years, whereas, when your acquaintance with her ripened, you would find that she lived with remarkable keenness in the present, and kept a wide and unwavering eye on a live and happier future. She appeared to be soft, gentle and helpless; in reality she was remarkably capable of taking care of herself, and though like ivy she appeared to cling to others for support, her nature was in truth that of the famous ivy that grew on the new mansion in Park Lane; it could stand upright with perfect ease, and was of metallic hardness. Adversity—for she had not had a very happy life—instead of breaking her, had tempered her to an exceeding toughness; what had been at the most soft iron was now reliable steel.

She gave a faint wan smile at Dora as she entered.

“I thought you would be here, dear,” she said. “Your Aunt Adeline has telephoned to know if we want her motor. We can have it till dinner-time and it will then take us to her house. I knew you liked a drive, so I thanked her and said ‘yes.’”

This was merely another way of putting the fact that Lady Austell wanted a drive and also wanted to talk to Dora. But her method of putting it sounded better, and was very likely quite true. Dora did like a drive and since her mother knew it, that might possibly have been the reason why she accepted Aunt Adeline’s offer. But Lady Austell’s next reason (though she had already given reason sufficient) was not so probable. “A drive will do you good, dear,” she said faintly. “You look a little fagged out and pale.”

Dora had learned not to dispute points with her mother. Though in general she was so full of discursive volubility, she was always rather silent with Lady Austell, of whom, in some way that she scarcely understood herself, she was considerably afraid. But that again was typical of the effect her mother produced on people; those who knew her but slightly thought she was the least formidable of women, but the better she was known the more she was feared. Often Dora argued to herself about the matter; she knew that she was not afraid of anything tangible her mother could do to her; she could not beat her or starve her, or ill-treat her, and it must have been her mother’s nature of which she was afraid. The feeling was analogous to a child’s fear of the dark; it fears not what it knows of, but the unknown possibilities that may lurk therein. It cannot say what they are; if it knew it would probably cease to fear them.

Dora got up at once.

“Yes, I should like a drive,” she said.

“Then put on your hat, dear.” And Lady Austell’s pale melancholy eyes fell on the half-trimmed straw.

“Another hat, Dora?” she asked. “I should have thought what you had would have lasted you till the end of the season!”

And at the words Dora’s pleasure in her new hat fell as dead as Sisera at Jael’s feet. Nobody could kill pleasure (though quite innocently) with so unerring an aim as Lady Austell.

“It didn’t cost twopence,” said Dora. “Jim sent me up the feathers from Grote.”

Lady Austell looked at the straw with an experienced eye.

“It is very cheap for less than twopence,” she remarked. “The only question is whether it was necessary. Then you will join me down below, dear? I have a note to write, and we may as well leave it instead of posting it.”

This was illustrative of the cause that had made Dora say that when women grew up they were very odd people. Lady Austell would unfalteringly drive through miles of odious roads to deliver a note rather than post it, but would on the same day drive to Oxford Street (a two-shilling fare in a hansom) in order to purchase what she would have paid sixpence more for round the corner. She was the victim of the habit of petty economy, in pursuit of which passion—one of the most fatal—she would become a perfect spendthrift, casting florins and half crowns right and left in order to save pennies. She took great care of the pence and the half-crowns presumably took care of themselves, for at any rate she took no care of them. But when other people’s expenditure was concerned, she took care of it all.

The note that had to be left (which concerned cessation of subscription from a library in Leicester Square) caused them to traverse the length of Piccadilly, and to retrace it, before they could leave the jostling traffic and turn into the Park, and it so happened that in this traverse of the streets, the month being mid-July, and the hour the late afternoon, Lady Austell had been almost incessantly occupied (though by her own word, she disliked all conventionality) in smiling sadly and regretfully as was her manner, at all the people she knew, and bowing (without a smile) to those who appeared to know her. Somehow, her smile, even when it was most gracious and welcoming, always suggested to the person on whom it was bestowed that something had gone wrong with his affairs, and Lady Austell knew and was most sympathetic, so that Mrs. Osborne (seated in a landau that bobbed prodigiously, owing to the extreme resilience of the springs that came from her husband’s workshops) receiving one of these felt certain for a moment that Mr. O.’s mission that afternoon had not prospered until she remembered that she had seen Lady Austell smile like that before. Soon after, walking gaily eastward, came Austell, whom she had thought to be still in the country, and on whom she bestowed a glance of pained wonder, closely followed by Claude, looking in spite of the heat of the day extremely cool and comfortable in a straw-hatted suit. Dora did not see him; she was at the moment smiling violently at some one who did not see her. Then the motor checked for a moment at the gates of the Park, slid forward again into the less populous ways, and Lady Austell, abandoning the duties of recognition, did her duty by her daughter. As usual she began a little way off the point so that she could get well into her stride, so to speak, before you saw that she was going anywhere in particular. This was a settled policy with her; it insured, in racing parlance, a flying start instead of a start from rest. During the drive down Piccadilly she had been arranging her thoughts with her usual precision; she knew not only what she was going to say, but how she was going to say it.

She gave a little sigh.

“What sermons there are not only in stones,” she said, “but in streets. And, do you know, dear, when one drives down Piccadilly like that and sees all sorts and conditions of men and women jostling each other, what strikes me is not how different people are, but how alike they are. All the differences (she was getting into her stride now) which we think of as so great are really so infinitesimal. Real differences, the things that matter, do not lie on the surface at all. I think our tendency is to make far too much out of mere superficialities and to neglect or discount those traits and qualities which constitute the essential differences between one man and another. Don’t you think so, dear?”

The ingenious Latin language has certain particles used in asking questions, one of which, the grammarian tells us, is used if a negative reply is expected, another if the reply is expected to be affirmative. Lady Austell, speaking in the less rich language of our day, could not make use of these, but there was something in her intonation quite as effective as “nonne.” Dora, without question, found herself saying “yes.”

“I am so glad you agree with me, dear,” went on her mother, “and I am sure you will agree with me also in the fact that, this being so, we should try to judge people, or rather to appreciate them, by the true and inner standard, not by the more obvious but less essential characteristics that we see on the surface.”

Lady Austell’s voice sank a little.

“If one may say so without irreverence,” she said, “how God must laugh at our divisions of classes. We must look like children arranging books by the colour of their covers instead of by their contents. We class all sorts of noble and ignoble people together and call them gentlemen, neglecting the only true classification altogether.”

It was evident now to Dora that her mother had got an excellent start, and she could see what she had started for. There was no need for reply, and Lady Austell having favoured a passing friend with a smile that was positively wintry in its sadness, proceeded.

“Such a good instance of what I am saying occurred to-day, dear,” she said. “Mr. Osborne called on me at six, as I think I told you he was going to do, and for the first time perhaps I fully saw what true delicacy and feeling he has, and how immensely these outweigh any of those things which we hastily might call faults of manner or breeding. It is the same with her, kind excellent woman that she is. What a priceless thing to inherit all that kindness and sweetness of nature.”

Lady Austell was flying along now; the race, so to speak, was clearly a sprint. Dora merely waited for her to breast the tape. She proceeded to do so.

“He came on a subject that very closely concerns you, dear,” she said, “and like a true gentleman he asked my permission before allowing any step to be taken. Can you guess, dear?”

Dora, as has been said, stood considerably in awe of her mother, but occasionally a discourse of this kind, which she felt to be entirely insincere, roused in her an impulse of the liveliest impatience, which gave sharpness to her tongue.

“Oh, dear, yes,” she said. “The truly delicate Mr. Osborne asked if Mr. Claude might pay his addresses to me. I expect he used just those words. I hope you allowed him to, mother.”

Lady Austell’s manner was always admirable. She appeared not to notice the sharpness of the speech at all. She laid her neatly gloved hand on Dora’s.

“Ah, my dearest,” she said.

She looked at her with her sad blue eyes, eyes that always looked tender and patient, even when she was disputing a fare with a cabman. “I am sure you will be very happy dear,” she said after a pause. “He is the most excellent young man, everyone speaks well of him. And, my dear, how good-looking. A perfect—I forget the name.”

Dora had a momentary tendency to giggle at the anticlimax of this. But she checked it, and again her impatience rose to the surface.

“Adonis?” she suggested. “But are not good looks one of those superficial things which we rate too high?”

Lady Austell smiled.

“Ah, you mischievous child,” she said. “You make fun of all I say. I will send a note to Mr. Osborne to-night, for I told him I should have to speak to you first. You will make him very happy, Dora, and you will make somebody else happier. Shall we turn?”

CHAPTER III.

THE garden front of Grote faced southeast, and thus, though all day the broad paved walk in front of it had been grilled by the burning of the August sun, the shadow of the house itself had spread over it like an incoming tide of dark clear water before tea time, and at this moment three footmen were engaged in laying the table for that meal, while the fourth, as a matter of fact, was talking to the stillroom maid under pretence of “seeing to” the urn. They were all in the famous Osborne livery, which was rather gorgeous and of the waspish scheme of colour. There were, it may be remarked, only four of them, because Mr. Osborne was still in London, roughing it, so his wife was afraid, with a kitchen-maid for cook, and only two footmen besides his own man, for Parliamentary business had kept him there for a few days after Mrs. Osborne had left to get things in order at Grote. But he was expected down this afternoon for a couple of nights before he went North, and the six footmen would shine together like evening stars. “Company” also, though not in large numbers, were also arriving that evening, among whom were Lady Austell, her son, and Dora. The latter was now formally and publicly engaged to Claude.

The house was three-storied, built in the Jacobean style of brick and stone with small-paned windows, and the brick had mellowed to that russet red which is as indescribable as it is inimitable. A door opened from the long gallery inside, which was panelled and hung with portraits—inalienable, luckily, or Austell would have got rid of them long ago—onto this broad-paved walk that ran from end to end of the house. On the other side of it was the famous yew hedge with square doors cut in it, through which were seen glimpses of the flower garden and long riband bed below, and the top of this hedge grew the grotesque shapes of birds. A flight of stone steps led down into the formal flower garden below, which was bordered on the far side by the long riband bed. Below that again two big herbaceous borders stretched away toward the lake, on the far side of which there rose from the edge of the water the great rhododendron thickets. To right and left lay the park, full of noble timber, which climbed up to the top of the hill opposite. Across this ran the road from the station, which skirted the lake on its eastern side, and passing by the flower garden came up to what Mrs. Osborne called “the carriage sweep” on the other side of the house, from which two wings projected, so that the carriage sweep was really the interior of a three-sided quadrangle.

The warning hoot of an approaching motor caused one of the footmen to disappear into the house with some alacrity, and a few minutes afterward Mr. Osborne emerged from the door into the gallery. He still wore London clothes, dark gray trousers and a black frock coat and waistcoat, for he had driven straight from the House of Commons to Victoria, but he had picked up a Panama hat in the hall, and had substituted it for his silk hat.

“And tell your missus I’ve come,” he observed to one of the wasps.

He sat down in a creaking basket-chair for a few moments, “to rest and cool,” as he expressed it to himself, and looked about him with extreme satisfaction. His big high-coloured face was capable of expressing an immense amount of contentment, and though from time to time he carried a large coloured handkerchief to his face, and mopped his streaming forehead with a whistled “Whew!” at the heat, so superficial a cause of discomfort could not disturb his intense satisfaction with life. Things had prospered amazingly with him and his: he was thoroughly contented with the doings of destiny.

He was still “resting and cooling” when Mrs. Osborne came bustling out of the house, also very hot, and kissed her husband loudly first on one cheek and then on the other.

“Well, and that’s right, my dear,” she said, “and it’s good to see you. But you are hot, Eddie, and is it wise for you to sit out o’ doors in the shadow without a wrap? You were always prone to take a chill.”

“I should be prone to take an apoplexy if I put anything else on, Mrs. O.,” remarked he. “But my! it’s a relief to get down into the country again. Not but what things haven’t gone very well this last week for me in the House. Commission on Housing of Employees! I had a good bit to tell them about that, and I warrant you they listened. Lor’, my dear, they like a plain man as’ll talk common sense to them, and tell ’em what he’s seen and what he knows, instead of argufying about procedure. I knew my figures, my dear, and my cubic feet per room, and my statistics about the health of my workmen and their death-rate. I’ve been a common man, myself, my dear, and I told them so, and told them what things was when I was a lad.”

Mrs. Osborne was slightly aghast.

“Oh! Eddie, I doubt that’ll tell against you,” she said.

“Not a bit of it, old lady. Everyone knew it to begin with, else I don’t say I should have told them. And equally they know that they come and dance at No. 92 when Mrs. O. invites them. Glad they are to come, too, and my dinner table is good enough for anybody to put his legs under. But all that’s over for the present, and I didn’t come away for my holiday, which I’ve deserved, to talk more politics; I came away to enjoy myself, and have a breath of country air. Eh! it’s a pretty little box this. I wish I could have bought it. I should have liked to leave a country seat for Per and Mrs. after you and me was dead and buried.”

This turn in the conversation was not quite to Mrs. Osborne’s taste.

“Don’t talk so light about dying, Mr. Osborne,” she said, “because you give me the creeps and the shivers for all it’s so hot. There’s a host of things too I want to talk to you about before the company comes, without thinking of buryings. There’s the two pictures of you and me arrived, and it would be a good thing if you’d cast your eye over the walls, and see where you’d like them hung, and we’d get them up at once. They’re a fine pair, they are, and the frames too, remarkably handsome.”

“Well, you want a handsome frame for a handsome bit of painting,” said her husband, “and finer works I’ve seldom seen. They was cheap at the price. Give me a cup of tea, Mrs. O., and we’ll go and have a squint at ’em. What else, my dear?”

Mrs. Osborne poured him out a cup of tea as she knew he liked it, extremely strong. She put in the cream first and stirred it up before handing to him.

“Your brother Alfred came yesterday,” she said, “and you must be careful how you behave to him Eddie. He’s got a touch of the lumbago, and it makes him worried.”

“Poor old Alf—cross as two sticks, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Mr. Osborne, sipping his tea loudly. “Never mind, there’s Claude to look after him, and Claude manages him as never was. He’s wrapped up in that lad, Maria, my dear, and I’m sure I don’t wonder. Where is the boy? And my lady Dora will be here this evening. Lord, Mrs. O., my tongue can’t say ‘Dora’ yet: it keeps saying ‘my lady.’ I seem as if I can’t get used to it. And what other of the lords and ladies have you got coming?”

“Well, there’s Lady Austell and the Earl, and there’s Lady Thurs—Lady May Thurston and Mr. Franklin, to whom she’s engaged——”

“Why, we’re a houseful of lovers,” said Mr. Osborne, beaming delightedly.

“That we are. Then there’s Alderman Price and lady, just run down from Sheffield, and Sir Thomas Ewart and lady——”

“Remind me to get out the ’40 port,” said Mr. Osborne. “Sir Thomas likes a glass of that.”

“He likes a dozen glasses of that,” remarked Mrs. Osborne, “but pray-a-don’t sit for ever over your wine at table, Mr. O., for there’s the—the—I never can remember the name of that quartette, but they’re going to give us a bit of music after——”

“Lashing out, lashing out,” said her husband, “you’ll make a pauper of me yet, Mrs. O.”

“Never you fear, but Dora loves music, and nothing would content Claude but that I must get the quartette down; and don’t you look at the bill, Mr. O., because it’s a scandal to pay that for a bit of music. And then there’s Percy and Catherine, and your brother.”

“Just a family party,” said Osborne, “that’s what I like. Family party and an old friend or two like Sir Thomas and lady. Times change, don’t they, Mrs. O.? There was a time when you and me felt so flustered at being bid to dinner with Sir T. that we were all of a tremble. Not much trembling now, eh? Ah, Maria, for what we have received the Lord make us truly thankful!”

Mrs. Osborne did not at once follow this.

“And since when have you said your grace after your tea, Eddie?” she asked.

“Oh, it wasn’t for my tea,” said he, “I was just thinking of everything, teas and breakfasts and luncheons and dinners and work and play and enjoyment alike. I’m thankful, I am thankful for it all.”

Then Mrs. Osborne understood and held out her plump hand with its large knuckles and immense jewelled rings to her husband.

“Eddie, my love,” she said, “and Lor’, here comes Alfred. Don’t go kissing my hand before him. He’d think it so silly.”

“Silly or not, Mrs. O., here goes,” said her husband, and imprinted a resounding caress on it.

Round the corner of the house had come a queer wizened little figure. Alfred, for all the heat of the day, was dressed in black broadcloth, wore a species of buckled goloshes over his shoes and had a plaid rug over his shoulders. From above the garish colours of this rose a very small head, which would have been seen to be bald had not its owner worn over it a cap of Harris tweed, the peak of which almost came over his eye. Below that appeared a thin little aquiline nose, a mouth so tight and thin-lipped that it looked as if it was not meant to open, and cheeks so hollow that they looked as if they were being sucked in by voluntary contraction. His walk was peculiar as his dress: he moved one foot a little forward and then put the other level with it. The same process repeated led to an extraordinarily deliberate progression.

Alfred was Mr. Osborne’s elder brother, older than him by some ten years. He had entered a broker’s office as clerk at the age of fifteen, and in the intervening years had, by means of careful and studied speculation, amassed a fortune, that had made Mr. Osborne on a former occasion remark that Claude would be a richer man than his father without ever having done a stroke of work for it. For Alfred (unmarried as yet) had made Claude his heir, a benefaction in return for which he “took it out” of Claude’s father and mother. By one of those strange fantasies of Nature which must supply her with so great a fund of amusement, he united to an unrivalled habit of being right with regard to the future movements of the stock market, an equally unrivalled eye for the merits of pictures, and had for years bought very cheaply such works as dealers and connoisseurs would run up and wrangle for at Christie’s a few years later. Here the inimitable humour of the construction of his nature came in, for well as he loved a picture, he loved a financial transaction a little more dearly, and sometimes he had collected works of an artist of no particular merit, in the consciousness that when dealers knew that he was buying them, they would begin to put the price up. Then he would gently unload, and leave them with unmarketable wares on their hands. He delighted in dealers, because they ministered to his recondite sense of fun; they did not delight in him, because they never knew whether he was collecting because he saw merit in an artist, or because his design was to make them think that such merit existed. One or two had tried to make friends with him, and asked him to dinner. He ate their dinners with a great appreciation, and scored off them worst of all. By some further strange freak of fancy, Nature had made it easy for him to acquire all that which his brother and sister-in-law could not acquire at all, for brother Alfred, in spite of his ridiculous clothes had the manner, the voice, and the ways of an eccentric and high-lineaged duke, cynical if you will, and of amazing ill-temper, a fancy which Mrs. Osborne delicately alluded to as being worried. He also gave the impression of infernal wickedness, a quality which he was quite lacking in, except as regards his ill-tempers. It was an undoubted fact that he invariably got the better of other competitors in speculating and picture dealing and such perfectly legitimate pursuits, which they might be inclined to attribute to diabolical alliances.

He crept toward the tea table, looked at his brother’s hand, which was held out in salutation, as if it was an insect, rejected it, and sat down pulling his shawl more closely about his shoulders.

“Fresh from your triumphs in the House, my dear Edward!” he said. “You positively reek of prosperity. You seem to be hot.”

“Well, I’m what I seem then,” said Mr. Osborne with great good nature. He could not possibly be other than polite to brother Alfred, who was to make Claude his heir, even if he had been tempted to do so. As a matter of fact, he was not so tempted. “Rum old Alf” was his only comment on his brother, when he had been more than usually annoying.

“I gather that the aristocracy assembles before dinner,” went on Alfred. “Maria, my dear, after giving me tea for forty years at frequent intervals, it is strange that you do not remember that I take milk and not cream. Another cup, please.”

“Well, and how’s the lumbago, Alf?” asked his brother. “Plumbago I call it: weighs as heavy as lead round the loins. Not but what I’ve only once had a touch of it myself.”

“Very humorous indeed,” said Alfred. There was certainly no doubt that brother Alfred was a good deal worried, and Mr. Osborne made the mental note that his lumbago must be very bad indeed to make him like this. Acid he always was, but not always vitriolic. But luckily both Mr. Osborne and his wife were proof against either acid or vitriol. They only felt sorry that brother Alf was so worried.

“Well, well, take your mind off it, Alf,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of fair dames coming down to cheer you up. Lord, Maria, what a rip brother Alf was when he was a young one. Opera every night and bouquets to the ladies on the stage——”

“Libel,” remarked Alfred.

Libel it was, but Mr. Osborne had intended it for a pleasant sort of libel. As the libel and not the pleasantness struck Alfred, he abandoned the topic.

“Bought any pictures lately, Alf?” he said.

“No, but there are two I should like to have sold. You and Maria; never saw such daubs. What did you pay for them? Twenty-five pounds apiece?”

Mrs. Osborne laughed, quite good humouredly.

“Why, if he’s not trying to buy them cheap off us,” she said, “and sell them expensive. Twenty-five pounds apiece! as if you didn’t know that the frames came to more. You and your joking, Alfred! Take a cucumber sandwich, which I know you like, though how you digest such cold vegetables at tea passes me. Why, I am reminded of a cucumber sandwich for hours after.”

“Where are you going to hang them?” asked brother Alfred.

“And if we weren’t just going indoors when we’ve finished our tea to look!” said Mrs. Osborne cordially. “Do come with us, Alfred, and give your advice.”

“I should recommend the coal cellar,” said Alfred. “They want toning.”

“Why, and he’s at his joke again!” said Mrs. Osborne, with placid admiration.

There is probably nothing more aggravating to a man in a thoroughly bad temper than to fail in communicating one single atom of it to others, but to have your most galling attacks received with perfect good humour. Such was the case with poor Alfred now; he could no more expunge the satisfaction from Eddie’s streaming countenance, or strike the smile from his sister-in-law’s powdered face, than he could make a wax doll cease smiling, except by smashing its features altogether. He tried a few further shafts slightly more poisoned.

“It’s odd to me, Maria,” he said, “that you don’t see how Sabincourt, or whatever the dauber’s name is——”

“Yes, Mr. Sabincourt, quite correct,” said Mrs. Osborne.

“How he has simply been making caricatures of you and my poor brother, making you sit with your rings and bracelets and necklaces and tiaras, just to show them off. And you, too, Edward, there you sit at your table with a ledger and a cash box and a telephone, just for all the world as if you were saying, ‘This is what honest hardware has done for me!’”

Mrs. Osborne was slightly nettled by this attack on her husband, but still she did not show it.

“And I’m sure Mr. Sabincourt’s done the telephone beautiful,” she said. “Why, when I stand and look at the picture, I declare I think I hear the bell ringing. And as for my necklace and tiaras, Alf, my dear, why it was Eddie who bade me put them on. No, we’ve got no quarrel with Mr. Sabincourt, I do assure you.”

Alfred gave her one glance of concentrated malevolence, and gave it up. Whether he would have tried it again after a short period for reflection is uncertain, but at this moment Claude came out of the house. “Hullo, father!” he said. “I thought I heard the motors. But I was changing.”

“Glad to see you, my boy. Been having a ride?”

“Yes, on the new mare Uncle Alf gave me. She’s a ripper, Uncle Alf. I’m ever so much obliged to you. And how’s the lumbago?”

Alfred’s face had changed altogether when Claude appeared, and for the look of peevish malignancy in his eyes there was substituted one of almost eager affection. And certainly, as Mr. Osborne had said, there was little wonder, for Claude’s appearance might have sweetened the most misanthropic heart. He was dressed quite simply and suitably in white flannels and white lawn tennis shoes, and the contrast between him and his father in his thick, heavy London clothes was quite amazing. His brown clean-shaven face was still a little flushed by his ride, and his hair was even now just drying back into its crisp curls after his bath. He did not bother his mother to pour him out tea, and instead made a bowl of it for himself in an unused slop-basin, moving the tea things with his long-fingered brown hands with a quick deftness that was delightful to watch.

“Four lumps of sugar, Claude?” asked his father. “You’ll be getting stout, my boy, and then what’ll your young lady say to you?”

Alfred turned a glance of renewed malignancy on to his brother as Claude laughed.

“She’ll say I’m taking after my father,” he remarked.

Alfred gave a little thin squeak of amusement. He had entirely failed to annoy his brother, but he hoped that Claude would have better luck. But again he was doomed to disappointment; Mr. Osborne’s watch chain only stirred and shook, as it did when he laughed internally.

Claude looked about for a teaspoon, took his mother’s, and stirring his slop-basin of tea, which was half milk, had a long drink at it.

“Father, I thought I’d drive the Napier over to meet Lady Austell and Dora,” he said, “if you don’t mind.”

“Why, there’s the two landaus going, and the brougham, and the bus for the servants,” said Mrs. Osborne. “What for do you want the car?”

Claude flushed a little.

“Oh, I only thought I should like to drive it,” he said. “It’s a smart turnout, too, and Dora likes motors.”

Mr. Osborne’s watch chain again responded to ventral agitations.

“Blest if he doesn’t want to give his girl a drive in his dad’s best car, to show off the car and his driving,” he said with some jocosity, which drew on him brother Alfred’s malignancy again.

“It’s a good thing you haven’t got to do the driving, Edward,” he observed. “Why shouldn’t the boy have the car out? I’ll pay for the petrol.”

The suggestion conveyed here was not quite a random libel. Alfred, with his inconvenient habit of observation, had seen that the cost of petrol was a thing that worried his brother and promised to be a pet economy, like the habit of untying parcels to save string, or lighting as many cigarettes as possible at the same match, or the tendency shown by Lady Austell to traverse miles of dusty streets in order to leave a note instead of posting it. And Mr. Osborne got up a little more hastily than he would otherwise have done if this remark had not been made.

“Oh, take the car, take the car, Claude,” he said. “Very glad you should, my boy. Now, Mrs. O., you and I will go in and see where we’ll hang our likenesses.”

Mr. Alfred waited till they had gone, and then drew his plaid a little closer round his shoulders with another squeak of laughter.

“I thought that would get the car for you, Claude,” he said; “that vexed your father.”

Claude finished his tea.

“I know it did, Uncle Alfred,” he said. “Why did you say it?”

“Why, to get you the car. That’s what I’m here for, to learn what you want and see you get it. There’s some use in me yet, my lad. Usually I can’t make your father annoyed with me, but I touched him up that time.”

Claude could not help smiling at his uncle’s intense satisfaction, as he sat there with shoulders hunched up, like a little malevolent ape, still grinning over the touch-up he had so dexterously delivered. He himself had got up after finishing his slop-basin of tea and was balanced on the arm of his chair, one slim leg crossed over the other, and his hands clasping his knees. His smile caused those great dark eyes nearly to close with the soft wrinkling up of the flesh at their outer corners, but closing them it opened his lips and showed the even white teeth between them. Then, with that gesture which was frequent with him, he tossed back his head and broke into a laugh.

“Well, it’s too bad of you,” he said, “but thanks for getting me the car. It’s a handsome bit of work; they told me at Napier’s there wasn’t such another on the road anywhere. And what if I do want to run Dora up in style? It’s natural, isn’t it?”

Somehow when Claude was with his father and mother he appeared to be a perfectly well-bred boy. But in spite of his extraordinary good looks and the perfect ease of his manner, the moment they had gone, and there was no standard of that kind to judge him by, he seemed different.

“It’ll be a pleasant change for her finding the house comfortable,” he went on, “with servants to answer the bells, and half a dozen bathrooms where there wasn’t one before, and no holes in the carpets to trip yourself over. The place was like an old dust heap when the lease was signed three weeks ago. But you may bet I made the furnishers and decorators put their best feet foremost, and I must say they’ve done it all in the best style. It’s a nice comfortable English house, that is what it is. Mother wanted to have no end of gilding and kickshaws. I put my foot on that and Per backed me up.”

Alfred shuffled to the house after Claude had gone, and made his way to the dining room, where he expected to find the portraits of his brother and sister-in-law in process of being placed. The gallery through which he had first to pass had been left more or less in the state the Osbornes had found it in, though it was with difficulty that Mrs. Osborne had been persuaded not to put down a carpet on the polished oak boards. But she had had her way with regard to a few Persian rugs which had been there, and which she pronounced not fit to be seen, and had got some nice thick pieces of the best Kidderminster instead. Otherwise the Jacobean oak of its chairs, tables and book-cases had been allowed to abide, nor had she interfered with the portraits of Wests that hung on its oak-panelled walls. But with the hall it was different; and she had made several striking changes here. There had not even been a hatrack in it, which did not matter much before, since the Wests had not entertained there for years, and you could put your hat down on one of the low oak chests. But Mrs. Osborne intended to entertain a great deal, and the first thing she did was to order two large mahogany hatstands with a sort of dock for umbrellas beneath, which she had placed one on each side of the door. On the white plaster walls between the oak pillars that ran up to the roof she had put up a couple of dozen stags’ heads (ordered from Roland Ward) and half a dozen foxes’ masks, which gave the place a baronial and sporting air. The light from the two old bronze lamps similarly was quite insufficient, and she had put up four very solid yet elegant (such was their official description) electric standards, one in each corner of the hall, while over the central table she suspended another from the rafters above, slightly ecclesiastic in design, though indeed it might suggest an earthly coronet of overwhelming proportions as much as a heavenly crown. A few stuffed tarpons, killed by Per in Florida, carried on the sporting note, which was further borne out by a trophy of spears and battle axes and bead aprons which he had brought with him from the same tour. Finally, she had introduced an enormous early Victorian mahogany sideboard for laying a cloak or a coat on, and on this also stood a stuffed crocodile-lizard sitting up on its hind-legs, and carrying in its fore paws a tray for cards. This had been a birthday present to her from Mrs. Alderman Price, who was expected that evening, and even Percy, who had such taste, had said it was very quaint. So there it stood in the middle of the mahogany sideboard, carrying in its tray only the card of the clergyman of the parish. But Mrs. Osborne had no fear about callers; she was long past all that, and surveying the hall only this morning she had said to herself with great satisfaction, “I declare I shouldn’t have known it, when I think what it was when I first see it.”

Alfred stood and looked about him for a moment or two when he came into this very suitably furnished hall, and observed with some silent amusement that Roland Ward’s label was still attached to one of the stag’s heads. This he did not remove; indeed, with the end of his stick he poked it into a rather more prominent position. Then he passed on into the dining room.

The two portraits were already hung, for Mr. Osborne had seen at once where they should go, above the new mahogany sideboard which was like that in the hall, and was, in fact, as Mrs. Osborne said, “its fellow.” The windows took up the long side opposite to them, and on the other two were some half dozen portraits, which Alfred had in vain tried to buy before now, but had found to his chagrin that they were inalienable. There was a Reynolds there, a Gainsborough, a couple of Romneys, and all had about them that indefinable air of race and breeding which the old English masters, lucky perhaps in their sitters, or at any rate in their own quality of vision, render so superbly. Till this evening the third wall had been empty; now Mr. and Mrs. Osborne, she in all her jewels, he with the telephone and ledger, shone there.

Alfred glanced round the room, but his eye came back to these two portraits. Sabincourt, that superb modern artist, had done the sitters justice, justice so rough that it might be taken for revenge. Mrs. Osborne sat full face, her white hair gathered beneath the all-round tiara of diamonds that she felt to be so heavy. Close round her neck was the Land’s End necklace, but a rope of pearls reached to her waist and was fastened there by an immense ruby. Her large pillowy arms were bare to the shoulder; in one hand she held the Perigaud fan, but it was so grasped that the rings on the hand that held it as well as the bracelets were in evidence. The other lay negligently, knuckles upwards, on the carved arms of her chair. Her face wore an expression of fatuous content, and it was extremely like her, cruelly like her. And Edward had fared as well (or as badly) at the eminent hands of the artist. A vulgar kindly face peered into his ledger, and as his wife said, you could almost hear the telephone bell ring.

Alfred seemed fascinated by the sight of the portraits, or rather by the sight of them in contrast with the others. He turned on the electric light which was attached to their frames, and drawing a chair from a table, sat down to observe them. Then he suddenly broke into a spasm of noiseless laughter, and slapped his thin thigh with his withered little hand.

After a while he rose.

“But I’ll get Sabincourt to paint one of Claude,” he said to himself, “and then ask any of these dealer-fools if it’s a West or an Osborne, bless his handsome face.”

Dinner that night was an extremely lengthy affair, but “informal-like, quite a family party,” as Mrs. Osborne explained to several of her guests, as she informed them whom they were to take in or be taken in by. May Thurston was furnished with the most complete explanation.

“I thought we’d all be comfortable and not stuck up, Lady Th—— Lady May, now that we’ve left London behind us,” she said, “and though I’m well aware, my dear, that Sir Thomas ought to take you in, by reason of your rank, since Mr. O. takes in Lady Austell, and the Earl me, I thought you’d not be ill-pleased if I passed you off with your young man, same as I’ve treated Lady Dora in sending her in with Claude. And so all you young people will be together, and a merry time you’ll have, I’ll be bound. Ah, there is Sir Thomas; I must explain to him.”

Sir Thomas cared little for precedence, but much for his dinner and more for his wine. He was considered quite a courtier in manner at Sheffield, and bowed to Mrs. Osborne on the conclusion of her explanation.

“When Mr. Osborne has the ordering of the wines, and Mrs. Osborne the commanding of the victuals,” he said handsomely, “he would be a man what’s hard to please if he wasn’t very well content. And to take in Mrs. Percy is an opportunity, I may say, of studying refinement and culture that doesn’t often——” Here Mrs. Percy herself entered the room, close to where they were standing, and he broke off, conscious of some slight relief, for he was one of those people who can very easily get into a long sentence, but find it hard to rescue themselves from being strangled by it when once there. “But speak of an angel,” he added, “and there comes a fluttering of wings.”

Thereafter the “gathering of the clans,” as Mr. Osborne usually expressed the assembly of guests for dinner, came thick, but before they were gathered a deafening gong announced that dinner was gathered too. Austell, with his weak pale face, came last but one, and finally his mother made her slow and impressive entry. She looked like an elderly dethroned princess, come back after exile to the native country where she no longer ruled, and stretched out both hands to Mrs. Osborne, whom she had not seen since her arrival.

“Dear Mrs. Osborne,” she said. “How glad I am! Quite charming. A family party!”

“Clans all gathered now, Mrs. O.,” said her husband. “Let’s have a bit of dinner.”

The dinner was served throughout on silver; a grove of wine glasses stood at the right hand of each guest. In deference to Alfred’s lumbago all windows were closed, and the atmosphere soon became very warm and comfortable indeed. An immense glass chandelier hanging above the table, and studded with electric lights, was the chief author of illumination, but clumps of other lights were on the walls, and each picture had its separate lamp. Sir Thomas’s courtier-like speeches soon ceased, and he was content to eat and listen to the cultured conversation that flowed from Mrs. Per’s lips, while his face gradually deepened in colour to a healthy crimson and his capacity for bowing must certainly have ceased also. He asked the butler, whom he called “waiter,” which was the year of each particular vintage that was so lavishly pressed upon him, and occasionally, after sipping it, interrupted the welling of the cool springs of culture to look codfish-like up the table toward Mr. Osborne, and say, “Capital ninety-two, this.” And then Mrs. Per would begin again. Her talk was like the flowing of a syphon; it stopped so long only as you put your finger on the end of it, but the finger removed, it continued, uninterrupted, pellucid, without haste or pause. She was the daughter of a most respectable solicitor in Sheffield, whose father and grandfather had been equally highly thought of, and Per openly acknowledged that some of the most chaste designs in the famous ornamental tinware were the fruits of her pencil. But with the modesty of true genius she seldom spoke of drawing, though she was so much wrapped up in art, but discussed its kindred manifestations, and in particular the drama.

She gave a sweet little laugh.

“Oh, Sir Thomas, you flatter me,” she said in response to some gross and preposterous compliment about her age, while he was waiting for a second helping of broiled ham, to which Mrs. Osborne had successfully tempted him. “Indeed, you flatter me. I am quite old enough to remember Irving’s ‘Hamlet.’ What an inspired performance! It made me quite ill, from nervous exhaustion, for a week. I had a silly little schoolgirl ‘Hamlet’ of my own—yes, I will allow I was at school, though nearly on the point of leaving, and I assure you Irving’s ‘Hamlet’ killed it, annihilated it, made it—is it naughty of me?—made it stillborn. It was as if it had never lived. How noble looking he was!”

Sir Thomas raised his eyes towards Mrs. Osborne. “Best peach-fed ham I ever came across,” he said. “Wonderful man, wasn’t he, Mrs. Percy? Great artist, eh?”

Dora from opposite had heard the end of this.

“Claude, dear,” she said, “who is that nice fat man? I never saw anybody like his dinner so much. What an angel! It is funny to me, you know, coming back here and finding you of all people in that heavenly car, ready to drive me up from the station. We didn’t go quite the shortest way, did we? Last time I was here there was only our old pony-trap to take me and my luggage, so I had to walk. And do you know, Mrs. Osborne has put me in my own room.”

Claude turned towards her. In spite of the awful heat caused by the shut windows and the rich exhalation of roast meats, he was still perfectly cool.

“I did that pretty well then?” he said. “Do you remember my asking you about the house, and where your room was, and all that? So you never guessed why I asked? It was just that you might have your old room again. Such a business as there was with the mater. She said you ought to be on the first landing, where those big handsome rooms are. But I said ‘No.’ Give Dora the room on the second floor beyond the old school room, and you won’t hear any complaints.”

“Ah, that makes it even nicer to know that you did it,” said she.

The conversation round the table for the moment had risen to a roar. Mrs. Osborne was tempting Alderman Price to the sorbet he had refused; Mrs. Per had got on to “The Bells,” which she allowed (incorrectly) that she had not seen; Mr. Osborne was shouting the year of the liqueur brandy which went with the ice to Sir Thomas; and May and Mr. Franklin were wrangling at the tops of their voices over some question of whether a certain dance had been on Tuesday or Wednesday. Lady Austell only looked slightly aloof, and followed the direction of her son’s eyes which were fixed, as by enchantment, on the picture of his hostess. And the crowd and the noise seemed to make a silence and isolation for the two lovers.

“But it was a business getting my way,” he said. “I never should have but that I was always the mater’s favourite.”

Dora heard the words and something suddenly jarred. Somehow he should not have put it like that; he thought of himself, he took credit—— And then before this rather disconcerting little moment succeeded in disturbing her, she looked at him again. There was the cool strong face, the smouldering eyes, that upward tilt of the chin, each inimitable, each Claude and no other.

“Favourite?” she said. “Do you expect me to be surprised?”

Quails, out of season, but probably delicious, had come and gone, and with the iced fruit salad that followed port was handed round. And with that first glass of port Mr. Osborne rose to his feet.

“Now it’s the first glass of good old port from Oporto, Sir Thomas,” he said, “and I ask the company to drink a health, not of this happy couple nor of that, as we well might do, God bless you my dears, but to someone else. Toasts I know are in general given after the dinner is over, and I hope Mrs. O. has got a savoury for you yet, and a peach or two. But it’s been my custom to propose a health with the first glass of port, such as I see now in my hand.”

Sir Thomas gave a choked laugh.

“Wish all toasts were drunk in such a glass of port, Osborne,” he said.

“Very kind, I’m sure, but silence for the chair, Sir Thomas. This is the first little dinner as we’ve had here, and may there be many to follow it, with all present as I see now. Ladies and gentlemen, who has had the privilege of entertaining you? Why Mrs. Osborne! Maria, my dear, your health and happiness, and no speech required. God bless you, Mrs. O.”

It was a complete surprise to Mrs. Osborne, and for one moment she felt so shy and confused she hardly knew which way to look. Then she knew, and with her kind blue eyes brimming she smiled at her husband. Everyone drank something, Sir Thomas his complete glass with a hoarse murmur of “no heel-taps”; Mrs. Per a little sip of water (being a teetotaller) with her little finger in exclusive elevation; Lady Austell something at random out of the seven glasses at her right hand, which had all been filled at different periods of dinner without her observing. And Dora, radiant, turned to Claude.

“Old darlings,” she said enthusiastically, and resumed her conversation with Mr. Franklin on her right.

But Claude was not quite pleased with this heartfelt interjection. It was affectionate, loving even, but something more was due to the son of the house. The interjection ought to have been a little more formal and appreciative. It should have saluted the importance and opulence of his parents as well as their kindliness. After all, who had done the house up, and made it habitable?

And then instantaneously this criticism expunged itself from his mind. Dora always said the thing that was uppermost in her mind and “old darlings” was a very good thing to be uppermost.

Harry Franklin and Claude found themselves side by side when, not so very long afterward, the ladies left the room, and Mr. Osborne, glass in hand, went round the table and sat between Austell and Sir Thomas. The others, with the exception of Alfred, who did not stir, but continued sitting where he was at the end of the room far away from door and window, closed up also, and another decanter of the ’40 port was brought.

“And when you’ve given me news of that, Lord Austell and Sir Thomas,” said Mr. Osborne genially, “I warrant there’ll be another to come up from my cellar without leaving it empty neither.”

The prospect seemed to invigorate Sir Thomas, and he emptied and filled his glass. Austell meantime was taken to task by his host for not doing the same, but was courteously firm in his refusal, in spite of Mr. Osborne’s assurance that you could bring up a child on this port without its knowing the meaning of a headache. Harry Franklin and Claude also were not doing their duty, so Mr. Osborne reminded them, but the rest were sufficiently stalwart to satisfy him.

“And the Navron quartette are playing afterward, are they not?” asked Harry. “May told me so.”

Claude frowned slightly.

“Yes, but when they’ll be able to begin, I don’t know,” he said. “When the pater gets somebody to appreciate his port you can’t tell when anything else will begin except another bottle. What I want is a cigarette, and a talk to Dora.”