He was there, in short, because he was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Temple.  After a two years’ absence from New England he had arrived in Waverton that day, “Oh, bother! bring him along,” had been the formula in which Miss Guion had conveyed his invitation, the dinner being but an informal, neighborly affair.  Two or three wedding gifts having arrived from various quarters of the world, it was natural that Miss Guion should want to show them confidentially to her dear friend and distant relative, Drusilla Fane.  Mrs. Fane had every right to this privileged inspection, since she had not only timed her yearly visit to her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Temple, so that it should synchronize with the wedding, but had introduced Olivia to Colonel Ashley, in the first place.  Indeed, there had been a rumor at Southsea, right up to the time of Miss Guion’s visit to the pretty little house on the Marine Parade, that the colonel’s calls and attentions there had been not unconnected with Mrs. Fane herself; but rumor in British naval and military stations is notoriously overactive, especially in matters of the heart.  Certain it is, however, that when the fashionable London papers announced that a marriage had been arranged, and would shortly take place, between Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Ashley, of the Sussex Rangers, and of Heneage Place, Belvoir, Leicestershire, and Olivia Margaret, only child of Henry Guion, Esquire, of Tory Hill, Waverton, near Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., no one offered warmer congratulations than the lady in whose house the interesting pair had met.  There were people who ascribed this attitude to the fact that, being constitutionally “game,” she refused to betray her disappointment.  She had been “awfully game,” they said, when poor Gerald Fane, also of the Sussex Rangers, was cut off with enteric at Peshawur.  But the general opinion was to the effect that, not wanting Rupert Ashley (for some obscure, feminine reason) for herself, she had magnanimously bestowed him elsewhere.  Around tea-tables, and at church parade, it was said “Americans do that,” with some comment on the methods of the transfer.

On every ground, then, Drusilla was entitled to this first look at the presents, some of which had come from Ashley’s brother officers, who were consequently brother officers of the late Captain Fane; so that when she telephoned saying she was afraid that they, her parents and herself, couldn’t come to dinner that evening, because a former ward of her father’s—­Olivia must remember Peter Davenant!—­was arriving to stay with them for a week or two, Miss Guion had answered, “Oh, bother! bring him along,” and the matter was arranged.  It was doubtful, however, that she knew him in advance to be the Peter Davenant who nine years earlier had had the presumption to fall in love with her; it was still more doubtful, after she had actually shaken hands with him and called him by name, whether she paid him the tribute of any kind of recollection.  The fact that she had seated