They had no sooner passed into the main hall than Kitty came running down-stairs, with a large packet in her hand.

“Mr. Darrell!”

“At your service!” said Darrell, emerging from the shadows of one of the broad corridors of the ground-floor.

“Take it, please!” said Kitty, panting a little, as she gave the packet into his hands.  “If I look at it any more, I might burn it!”

“Suppose you do!”

“No, no!” said Kitty, pushing the bundle away, as he laughingly tendered it.  “I must see what happens!”

“Is the gap filled?”

She laid her finger on her lips.  Her eyes danced.  Then she hurried on to the drawing-room.

Whether it were the soothing presence of the clergy or no, certainly Kitty was no less triumphant at dinner than she had been in the afternoon.  The chorus of fun and pleasure that surrounded her, while he himself sat, tired and bored, between Lady Edith Manley and Lady Tranmore, did but make her offence the greater in the eyes of Lord Parham.  He had so far buried it in a complete and magnificent silence.  The meeting between him and his hostess before dinner had been marked by a strict conformity to all the rules.  Kitty had inquired after his headache; Lord Parham expressed his regrets that he had missed so brilliant a party; and Kitty, flirting her fan, invented messages from the Royalties which, as most of those present knew, the Royalties had been far too well amused to think of.  Then after this pas seul, in the presence of the crowded drawing-room, had been duly executed, Kitty retired to her Bishop, and Lord Parham led forth Lady Tranmore.

* * * * *

“What a lovely moon!” said Lady Edith Manley to the Dean.  “It makes even this house look romantic.”

They were walking outside the drawing-room windows, on a terrace which was, indeed, the only feature of the Haggart facade which possessed some architectural interest.  A low balustrade of terra-cotta, copied from a famous Italian villa, ran round it, broken by large terra-cotta pots now filled with orange-trees.  Here and there between the orange-trees were statues transported from Naples in the late eighteenth century by a former Lord Tranmore.  There was a Ceres and a Diana, a Vestal Virgin, an Athlete, and an Antinous, now brought into strange companionship under the windows of this ugly English house.  Chipped and blackened as they were, and, to begin with, of a mere decorative importance, they still breathed into the English evening a note of Italy or Greece, of things lovely and immortal.  The lamps in the sitting-rooms streamed out through the widely opened windows upon the terrace, checkering the marble figures, which now emerged sharply in the light, and now withdrew in the gloom; while at one point they shone plainly upon an empty pedestal before which the Dean and his companion paused.

The Dean looked at the inscription.  “What a pity!  This once held a statue of Hebe holding a torch.  It was struck by lightning fifty years ago.”