“I have spent the entire morning by the lake,” Mr. Kennaston informed the party at large, “in company with a mocking-bird who was practising a new aria.  It was a wonderful place; the trees were lisping verses to themselves, and the sky overhead was like a robin’s egg in colour, and a faint wind was making tucks and ruches and pleats all over the water, quite as if the breezes had set up in business as mantua-makers.  I fancy they thought they were working on a great sheet of blue silk, for it was very like that.  And every once in a while a fish would leap and leave a splurge of bubble and foam behind that you would have sworn was an inserted lace medallion.”

Mr. Kennaston, as you are doubtless aware, is the author of “The King’s Quest” and other volumes of verse.  He is a full-bodied young man, with hair of no particular shade; and if his green eyes are a little aged, his manner is very youthful.  His voice in speaking is wonderfully pleasing, and he has a habit of cocking his head on one side, in a bird-like fashion.

“Indeed,” Mr. Petheridge Jukesbury observed, “it is very true that God made the country and man made the town.  A little more wine, please.”

Mr. Jukesbury is a prominent worker in the cause of philanthropy and temperance.  He is ponderous and bland; and for the rest, he is president of the Society for the Suppression of Nicotine and the Nude, vice-president of the Anti-Inebriation League, secretary of the Incorporated Brotherhood of Benevolence, and the bearer of divers similar honours.

“I am never really happy in the country,” Mrs. Saumarez dissented; “it reminds me so constantly of our rural drama.  I am always afraid the quartette may come on and sing something.”

Kathleen Eppes Saumarez, as I hope you do not need to be told, is the well-known lecturer before women’s clubs, and the author of many sympathetic stories of Nature and animal life of the kind that have had such a vogue of late.  There was always an indefinable air of pathos about her; as Hunston Wyke put it, one felt, somehow, that her mother had been of a domineering disposition, and that she took after her father.

“Ah, dear lady,” Mr. Kennaston cried, playfully, “you, like many of us, have become an alien to Nature in your quest of a mere Earthly Paradox.  Epigrams are all very well, but I fancy there is more happiness to be derived from a single impulse from a vernal wood than from a whole problem-play of smart sayings.  So few of us are natural,” Mr. Kennaston complained, with a dulcet sigh; “we are too sophisticated.  Our very speech lacks the tang of outdoor life.  Why should we not love Nature—­the great mother, who is, I grant you, the necessity of various useful inventions, in her angry moods, but who, in her kindly moments—­” He paused, with a wry face.  “I beg your pardon,” said he, “but I believe I’ve caught rheumatism lying by that confounded pond.”