and watching with deep dubiety the departing form of their escort, as though a sudden and shattering doubt of his identity had paralysed them, until some contrary wind of doctrine blew them into action again, and they hurled themselves upon his trail, filled with the single intention to rush between his legs.  Nothing but that instinct of self-preservation that operates independent of the reason, preserved Larry from frequent and violent overthrow.  His head was in the clouds; he was abandoning himself to dreams, with the very same headlong enthusiasm that Scandal and Steersman brought to bear upon the problems of existence.  He strode past the glade that had been the scene of the Cluhir picnic without so much as a thought of Tishy Mangan.  Had you or I reminded him of that brief, yet moving, episode, he would probably have regarded us with wide, bewildered, blue eyes, and asked for details.  Then, as memory awakened, he would have laughed delightedly, and said:  “Yes!  By Jove!  So I was!  But Georgy cut me out, didn’t he?” And he might have added that there had been scores of them since Tishy, he had forgotten half of them—­but this, THIS!  Larry would then, inevitably, have lapsed into rhapsody, as would be no more than was decent and right in a young man of artistic temperament, and you or I, our malign intention baffled, would have retired in deserved confusion.

Old Evans was in the hall as Larry walked in through the open door.  He received Larry’s hand-shake coldly; the four years that had passed since Larry had seen him had withered and greyed him; Larry, something dashed by the reception, remembered the title given him long ago by Christian—­“the many-wintered crow,”—­and found satisfaction in deciding that the crow was a scald-crow, and a sour old divil at that; anyhow, Evans had always had a knife into him, so it made no difference.

In the drawing-room things went well enough, even though there was an unexplainable chill in the atmosphere.  Cousin Isabel was as kind and gentle and vague as ever; Judith was there, very handsome and prosperous, not overenthusiastic in welcome, rather inclined to patronise a very young man, quite two months younger than a married lady of position and importance.  Nevertheless, there was something unregenerate about her eye, that, taken in connection with the two subalterns in whose car she had come to call at Mount Music, suggested that Bill Kirby might at times find life stirring.  John, recently ordained, now a very decorative curate in a London church, was there, even more patronising than Judith, and undecided whether to regard Larry with suspicion, as a brand still smouldering from the fires of secularist France, or affectionately, as a member of what, in one of his earlier sermons, he had described as “Our ancient Mother Church, dear Peopul!  Beloved, but in some matters, that I will presently indicate to you, mistaken!”

The subalterns were remote, not approving of the style of Larry’s tie (which he had bought in Paris, and differed from theirs) and Cousin Dick was not there.