Colonel Musgrave—­since the remainder of his house-party had already breakfasted—­raised his fine eyes toward the chandelier, and sighed, as Pilkins demurely closed the dining-room door.

Leander Pilkins—­butler for a long while now to the Musgraves of Matocton—­would here, if space permitted, be the subject of an encomium.  Leander Pilkins was in Lichfield considered to be, upon the whole, the handsomest man whom Lichfield had produced; for this quadroon’s skin was like old ivory, and his profile would have done credit to an emperor.  His terrapin is still spoken of in Lichfield as people in less favored localities speak of the Golden Age, and his mayonnaise (boasts Lichfield) would have compelled an Olympian to plead for a second helping.  For the rest, his deportment in all functions of butlership is best described as super-Chesterfieldian; and, indeed, he was generally known to be a byblow of Captain Beverley Musgrave’s, who in his day was Lichfield’s arbiter as touched the social graces.  And so, no more of Pilkins.

Mrs. Pendomer partook of chops.  “Is this remorse,” she queried, “or a convivially induced requirement for bromides?  At this unearthly hour of the morning it is very often difficult to disentangle the two.”

“It is neither,” said Colonel Musgrave, and almost snappishly.

Followed an interval of silence.  “Really,” said Mrs. Pendomer, and as with sympathy, “one would think you had at last been confronted with one of your thirty-seven pasts—­or is it thirty-eight, Rudolph?”

Colonel Musgrave frowned disapprovingly at her frivolity; he swallowed his coffee, and buttered a superfluous potato.  “H’m!” said he; “then you know?”

“I know,” sighed she, “that a sleeping past frequently suffers from insomnia.”

“And in that case,” said he, darkly, “it is not the only sufferer.”

Mrs. Pendomer considered the attractions of a third waffle—­a mellow blending of autumnal yellows, fringed with a crisp and irresistible brown, that, for the moment, put to flight all dreams and visions of slenderness.

“And Patricia?” she queried, with a mental hiatus.

Colonel Musgrave flushed.

“Patricia,” he conceded, with mingled dignity and sadness, “is, after all, still in her twenties——­”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pendomer, with a dryness which might mean anything or nothing; “she was only twenty-one when she married you.”

“I mean,” he explained, with obvious patience, “that at her age she—­not unnaturally—­takes an immature view of things.  Her unspoiled purity,” he added, meditatively, “and innocence and general unsophistication are, of course, adorable, but I can admit to thinking that for a journey through life they impress me as excess baggage.”

“Patricia,” said Mrs. Pendomer, soothingly, “has ideals.  And ideals, like a hare-lip or a mission in life, should be pitied rather than condemned, when our friends possess them; especially,” she continued, buttering her waffle, “as so many women have them sandwiched between their last attack of measles and their first imported complexion.  No one of the three is lasting, Rudolph.”