Leslie nodded.  “Useful boy—­very.  And pleasant company, you know.  I don’t know much about these things, but he seems to have a splendid eye for a good thing.  Funny thing is, it works all round—­in all departments.  Native genius, not training.  He sees a horse between a pair of shafts in a country lane; looks at it; says ’That’s good.  That would have a fair chance for the Grand National’—­Urquhart buys it for fifty pounds straight away—­and it does win the Grand National.  And he knows nothing special about horses, either.  That’s what I call genius.  It’s the same eye that makes him spot a dusty old bit of good china on a back shelf of a shop among a crowd of forged rubbish.  I’ve none of that sort of sense; I’m hopeless.  But I like good things, and I can pay for them, and I give that boy a free rein.  He’s furnishing my house well for me.  It seems to amuse him rather.”

“He loves it,” said Felicity.  “His love of pleasant things is what he lives by.  Including among them Denis Urquhart, of course.”

“Yes.”  Leslie pursed thoughtful lips over Denis Urquhart.  He was perhaps slightly touched with jealousy there.  He was himself rather drawn towards that tranquil young man, but he knew very well that the drawing was one-sided; Urquhart was patently undrawn.

“Rather a flash lot, the Urquharts, aren’t they?” he said; and Peter, who liked him, would have had to admit that the remark was perilously near to a bound.  “Seem to have a sort of knack of dazzling people.”

“He’s an attractive person, of course,” Miss Hope replied; and she didn’t say it distantly; she was so sorry for people who bounded, and so many of her friends did.  “It’s pleasing to see, isn’t it—­such whole-souled devotion?”

Mr. Leslie grunted.  “I won’t say pearls before swine—­because Urquhart isn’t a swine, but a very pleasant, ordinary young fellow.  But worship like that can’t be deserved, you know; not by anyone, however beautifully he motors through life.  Margerison’s too—­well, too nice, to put it simply—­to give himself to another person, body and soul, like that.  It’s squandering.”

“And irritates you,” she reflected, but merely said, “Is squandering always a bad thing, I wonder?”

It was at this point that Peter and Urquhart came in.  Directed by Felicity to Lucy in an obscure corner, they found her being talked to by one of the Oddities; he looked rather like an oppressed Finn.  He was talking and she was listening, wide-eyed and ingenuous, her small hands clasped on her lap.  Peter and Urquhart sat down by her, and the oppressed Finn presently wandered away to talk to Lucy’s father.

Lucy gave a little sigh of relief.

“Wish they wouldn’t come and talk to me,” she said.  “I’m no good to them; I don’t understand; and I hate people to be unhappy.  I’m dreadfully sorry they are.  I don’t want to have to think about them.  Why can’t they be happy?  There are so many nice things all about.  ’Tis such waste.”  She looked up at Urquhart, and her eyes laughed because he was happy and clean, and shone like a new pin.