At this they all roar, as people will, at anything, when they have nothing else to do.  Even Tita, who, though smiling always, is looking rather depressed, gives way to a merry little laugh.  Hearing her, Margaret blesses Randal for his silly old joke.

“Oh, Randal! you are too stupid for anything,” says Tita, showing all her pretty teeth.

“You have for once lighted on a solemn truth,” puts in Randal’s aunt grimly.  “Let us hope you are getting sense.”

“Or a wise tooth,” says Colonel Neilson, with a friendly smile at Tita.  “Lady Rylton is very nearly old enough to be thinking of that now.”

“As for that wretched Mrs. Tyneway,” says Miss Gower, taking no notice of him, “if her husband did so far take the law into his own hands as to make her black and blue, I, for one, should not blame him.”

“That’s funny!” says Mrs. Chichester, giving her a saucy little smile.

“What is funny, may I ask?”

“To hear you defend a man.  I thought you despised them in a body.”

“I have my own views about them,” says Miss Gower, with a sniff.  “But I admit they have rights of their own.”

“Fancy allowing a man to have rights nowadays!” cries Mrs. Chichester, uplifting her long arms as if in amazement.  “Good heavens!  What a wife you would have made!  Rights?” She looks up suddenly at Captain Marryatt, who is, as usual, hanging over the back of her chair.  “Do you think a man has any rights?”

“If you don’t, I don’t,” returns that warrior, with much abasement and perhaps more sense than one would have expected from him.

“Good boy,” says she, patting his hand with her fan.

“I suppose husbands have some rights, at all events?” says Sir Maurice.

He says it quite lightly—­quite debonnairly, yet he hardly knows why he says it.  He had been looking at Tita, and suddenly she had looked back at him.  There was something in the cold expression of her face, something defiant, that had driven him to make this foolish speech.

“Husbands?  Pouf!  They least of all,” says Mrs. Chichester, who loves to shock her audience, and now finds Miss Gower ready to her hand.

“Where is your husband now, Mrs. Chichester?” asks Colonel Neilson, quite without malice prepense.

Margaret gives him a warning glance, just a little too late.  Though indeed, after all, what is there to warn about Mrs. Chichester?  She is only one of a thousand flighty young women one meets every day, and though Captain Marryatt’s infatuation for her is beyond dispute, still, her infatuation for him has yet to be proved.  Margaret had objected to her, in her own mind, as a companion for Tita—­Tita, who seems too young to judge for herself in the matter of friendships.

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” returns Mrs. Chichester, lifting her shoulders.  “Miss Gower will tell you; she knows everything.  Miss Gower,” raising her voice slightly, and compelling that terrible old woman to look at her, “will you tell Colonel Neilson where my husband is now?”