Marcia—­“I shall never forget that charming scene when Douglas made a hundred, not out, the first day of the Flood cricket week, when he was sixteen.  Sir Arthur’s face!  And don’t you remember how he went about half the evening with his arm round the boy’s shoulders?”

Winifred—­“Yes, and how Douglas hated it!  I can see him wriggling now.  Do you remember that just a week after that, Douglas broke his hunting-whip beating a labourer’s boy, whom he found trespassing in one of the coverts, and how Sir Arthur paid fifty pounds to get him out of the scrape?”

Marcia, indignantly—­“Of course that was just a lad’s high spirits!  I have no doubt the labourer’s boy richly deserved it.”

Winifred—­“Really, Marcia, your tone towards the lower orders!  You don’t allow a labourer’s boy any high spirits!—­not you!  And I suppose you’ve quite forgotten that horrid quarrel between the hunt and the farmers which was entirely brought about by Douglas’s airs.  ’Pay them!—­pay them!’ he used to say—­’what else do the beggars want?’ As if money could settle everything!  And I remember a farmer’s wife telling me how she had complained to Douglas about the damage done by the Flood pheasants in their fields.  And he just mocked at her.  ’Why don’t you send in a bigger bill?’ ‘But it’s not only money, my lady,’ she said to me.  ’The fields are like your children, and you hate to see them wasted by them great birds—­money or no money.  But what’s the good of talking?  Fallodens always best it!’”

Marcia—­with the air of one defending the institutions of her country—­“Shooting and hunting have to be kept up, Winifred, for the sake of the physique of our class; and it’s the physique of our class that maintains the Empire.  What do a few fields of corn matter compared with that!  And what young man could have done a more touching—­a more heroic thing—­than—­”

Winifred, contemptuously—­“What?—­Sir Arthur’s accident?  You always did lose your head about that, Marcia.  Nothing much, I consider, in the story.  However, we shan’t agree, so I’d better go to my choir practice.”

When she was out of sight, and Marcia, who was always much agitated by an encounter with her sister, was still angrily fanning herself, Connie laid a hand on her aunt’s knee.  “What was the story, Aunt Marcia?”

Lady Marcia composed herself.  Connie, in a thin black frock, with a shady hat and a tea-rose at her waist, was looking up at the elder lady with a quiet eagerness.  Marcia patted the girl’s hand.

“Winifred never asked your opinion, my dear!—­and I expect you know him a great deal better than either of us.”

“I never knew him before this year.  That’s a very little while.  I—­I’m sure he’s difficult to know.  Perhaps he’s one of the people—­who”—­she laughed—­“who want keeping.”