“Dear me, what modesty,” Lady Caroom remarked, laughing.  “To us, however, you happened to be very important.  I hate a party of three.”

Brooks helped himself to a quail, and remembered that he was hungry.

“This is very unusual dissipation, isn’t it?” he asked.  “I never dreamed that you would be likely to come into our little theatre.”

“It was Sybil’s doings,” Lady Caroom answered.  “She declared that she was dull, and that she had never seen A Message from Mars. I think that all that serious talk the other evening gave her the blues.”

“I am always dull in the winter when there is no hunting,” Sybil remarked.  “This frost is abominable.  I have not forgotten our talk either.  I feel positively wicked every time I sip champagne.”

“Our young philanthropist will reassure you,” Arranmore remarked, drily.

Lady Caroom sighed.

“I wonder how it is,” she murmured, “that one’s conscience and one’s digestion both grow weaker as one grows old.  You and I, Arranmore, are content to accept the good things of the earth as they come to us.”

“With me,” he answered, “it is the philosophy of approaching old age, but you have no such excuse.  With you it must be sheer callousness.  You are in an evil way, Lady Caroom.  Do have another of these quails.”

“You are very rude,” she answered, “and extremely unsympathetic.  But I will have another quail.”

“I do not Want to destroy your appetite, Mr. Brooks,” Lady Sybil said, “but this is—­if not a farewell feast, something like it.”

He looked at her with sudden interest.

“You are going away?” he exclaimed.

“Very soon,” she assented.  “We were so comfortable at Enton, and the hunting has been so good, that we cut out one of our visits.  Mamma developed a convenient attack of influenza.  But the next one is very near now, and our host is almost tired of us.”

Lord Arranmore was for a moment silent.

“You have made Enton,” he said, “intolerable for a solitary man.  When you go I go.”

“I wish you could say whither instead of when,” Lady Caroom answered.  “How bored you would be at Redcliffe.  It is really the most outlandish place we go to.”

“Why ever do we accept, mamma?” Sybil asked.  “Last year I nearly cried my eyes out, I was so dull.  Not a man fit to talk to, or a horse fit to ride.  The girls bicycle, and Lord Redcliffe breeds cattle and talks turnips.”

“And they all drink port after dinner,” Lady Caroom moaned; “but we have to go, dear.  We must live rent free somewhere during these months to get through the season.”

Sybil looked at Brooks with laughter in her eyes.

“Aren’t we terrible people?” she whispered.  “You are by way of being literary, aren’t you?  You should write an article on the shifts of the aristocracy.  Mamma and I could supply you with all the material.  The real trouble, of course, is that I don’t marry.”