“Oh, Dads—­how wonderful!  And can’t you and Mother come?  And oh! can I take Wellington?”

“I think so, dear, if he hasn’t hydrophobia,” and the man bent to pat the head of the great dog which had crept from under the bed at the sound of his name.

And later Dads stood at his window, smoking two last pipes, whilst a glimpse into the future was allowed him.

“Can it be—­can it possibly be,” he said, puffing clouds of smoke into the creeper, to the annoyance of many insects, “Big Ben Kelham?—­and the estates run alongside.  Wonder if Teresa has noticed anything.  And—­by Jove!—­of course!—­he’s at Heliopolis, getting over his hunting accident.  I wonder------”

And Damaris sat at her window, with her arms round the dog, who longed inordinately for his mat.

“The desert,” she whispered.  “The pyramids—­the bazaar—­life—­adventure.  How wonderful!” There came a long, long pause, and then she added, as she turned towards a coloured picture of the Sphinx upon the wall, “And who cares if the nail is a tin-tack or a screw?”

As it happened, it was destined to be the jewel-hilted, double-edged, unsheathed dagger of love.

And Fate, having mislaid her glasses, worked her shuttle at hazard in and out of that picture of intricate pattern called Life, and having tangled and knotted together the crimson thread of passion, the golden thread of youth and the honest brown of a deep, undemonstrative love, she left the disentanglement of the muddle in the hands of Olivia, Duchess of Longacres.

Her Grace was over eighty.

Of a line of yeomen ancestors ranging back down the centuries to the William Carew who had fought for Harold, she had been, about sixty-five years ago, the belle of Devon.  Against the warnings of her heart and to the delight of her friends and family, she had married the Duke of Longacres, whose roving eye had been arrested by her beauty at a meet of the Devon and Somerset, and his equally roving heart temporarily captured by the indifference of her demeanour towards his autocratic self.

She had lost him, to all intents and purposes, two years after the marriage, but blinding her eyes and stuffing her ears, had held high her beautiful head and high her honour, filling her empty heart with the love of her son and the esteem of her legion of real friends; showing the bravest of beautiful faces to the world, until a happy widowhood had set her free.

Some years of absolute happiness of the simplest kind had followed; the marriage of her son and birth of her grandson, who had cost his mother her life.  Then the following year had come the Boer War, and the heroic tragedy of Spion Kop, which left her childless; after that, many years of utter devotion, to her grandson, who adored her; then the Great War and the Battle of the Falkland Islands, which left her absolutely bereft, with the care of the boy’s greatest treasure, even the grey parrot, Quarter-Deck, Dekko for short.