* * * * *

Presently, as she and her two companions wound slowly up the moor, Sir Luke Malford, who had only arrived the night before, inquired gaily of his hostess: 

“So she wouldn’t come?—­the little wife?”

“I gave her every chance.  She scorned us.”

“You mean—­’she funked us.’  Have you any idea, I wonder, how alarming you are?”

Lady Dunstable exclaimed impatiently: 

“People represent me as a kind of ogre.  I am nothing of the kind.  I only expect everybody to play up.”

“Ah, but you make the rules!” laughed Sir Luke.  “I thought that young woman might have been a decided acquisition.”

“She hadn’t the very beginnings of a social gift,” declared his companion.  “A stubborn and rather stupid little person.  I am much afraid she will stand in her husband’s way.”

“But suppose you blow up a happy home, by encouraging him to come without her?  I bet anything she is feeling jealous and ill-used.  You ought—­I am sure you ought—­to have a guilty conscience; but you look perfectly brazen!”

Sir Luke’s banter was generally accepted with indifference, but on this occasion it provoked Lady Dunstable.  She protested with vehemence that she had given Mrs. Meadows every chance, and that a young woman who was both trivial and conceited could not expect to get on in society.  Sir Luke gathered from her tone that she and Mrs. Meadows had somewhat crossed swords, and that the wife might look out for consequences.  He had been a witness of this kind of thing before in Lady Dunstable’s circle; and he was conscious of a passing sympathy with the pleasant-faced little woman he remembered at Crosby Ledgers.  At the same time he had been Rachel Dunstable’s friend for twenty years; originally, her suitor.  He spent a great part of his life in her company, and her ways seemed to him part of the order of things.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Meadows walked back to the house.  He had been a good deal nettled by Lady Dunstable’s last remark to him.  But he had taken pains not to show it.  Doris might say such things to him—­but no one else.  They were, of course, horribly true!  Well—­quarrelling with Lady Dunstable was amusing enough—­when there was room to escape her.  But how would it be in the close quarters of a yacht?

On his way through the garden he fell in with Miss Field—­Mattie Field, the plump and smiling cousin of the house, who was apparently as necessary to the Dunstables in the Highlands, as in London, or at Crosby Ledgers.  Her role in the Dunstable household seemed to Meadows to be that of “shock absorber.”  She took all the small rubs and jars on her own shoulders, so that Lady Dunstable might escape them.  If the fish did not arrive from Edinburgh, if the motor broke down, if a gun failed, or a guest set up influenza, it was always Miss Field who came to the rescue.  She had devices for every emergency.  It was generally supposed that she had no money, and that the Dunstables made her residence with them worth while.  But if so, she had none of the ways of the poor relation.  On the contrary, her independence was plain; she had a very free and merry tongue; and Lady Dunstable, who snubbed everybody, never snubbed Mattie Field.  Lord Dunstable was clearly devoted to her.