Lady Splay succeeded and, carrying the four croquet balls with her, went round the rest of the hoops and pegged out.

“I must go in and change,” she said, and suddenly, in a voice of melancholy, she cried, “Oh, I do wish——­” and stopped.

“What?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she answered.  But her eyes were upon the window, where Joan Whitworth stood in full view in all her disfiguring panoply.  Lady Splay wrung her hands helplessly.  “Oh, dear, dear, if she weren’t so thorough!” she moaned.

When they returned into the drawing-room, Sir Chichester was still standing near to Harold Jupp and Dennis Brown, shifting from one foot to another, and making little inarticulate sounds in his throat.

“Haven’t you two finished yet?” asked Millicent Splay.

“Just,” said Dennis Brown, rubbing his hands together with a laugh, “and we ought to have four nice wins to-morrow.”

“Good!” said Sir Chichester.  “Then might I have a newspaper?”

“But of course,” said Dennis Brown, and he handed one over the table to him.  “You haven’t been waiting for it all this time, Sir Chichester?”

“Oh no, no, no,” exclaimed Sir Chichester, quickly.  He glanced with a swift and experienced eye down the columns, and tossed the paper aside.

“Might I have another?”

“But of course, sir.”

The second paper was disposed of as rapidly as the first, and the others followed in their turn.

“Nothing in them,” said Sir Chichester with a resigned air.  “Nothing in them at all.”

Millie Splay laughed.

“All that my husband means is that his name is not to be found in any one of them.”

“The occurrence seems so rare that he has no great reason to complain,” said Hillyard; and, in order to assuage any disappointment which might still be rankling in the baronet’s bosom, Hillyard related at the dinner-table, with the necessary discretions, his election to the mess at Senga.

Sir Chichester was elated.  “So far away my name is known!  Really, that is very pleasant hearing!”

There was no offence to him in the reason of his honorary membership of the Senga mess, which, however carefully Hillyard sought to hide it, could not but peep out.  Sir Chichester neither harboured illusions himself as to his importance nor sought to foster them in others.  There was none of the “How do these things get into the papers?” about him.

“I am not a public character.  So I have to take trouble to keep myself in print.  And I do—­a deuce of a lot of trouble.”

“Now, why?” asked Harold Jupp, who possessed an inquiring mind and was never satisfied by anything but the most definite statements.

“Because I like it,” replied Sir Chichester.  “I am used to it, and I like it.  Unless I see my name in real print every morning, I have all day the uncomfortable sensation that I am not properly dressed.”