Decision had vanished from her face, with its arched nose and slightly sloping chin, as though some one had suddenly appealed to her to trust her instincts.  It was quite pathetic.  Still, there was always the book’s circulation to form her judgment by.

“I think I ‘d better mark it,” she said, “don’t you?  Were you lookin’ for Antonia?  If you come across Bunyan in the garden, Dick, do say I want to see him; he’s gettin’ to be a perfect nuisance.  I can understand his feelin’s, but really he ‘s carryin’ it too far.”

Primed with his message to the under-gardener, Shelton went.  He took a despairing look into the billiard-room.  Antonia was not there.  Instead, a tall and fat-cheeked gentleman with a neat moustache, called Mabbey, was practising the spot-stroke.  He paused as Shelton entered, and, pouting like a baby, asked in a sleepy voice,

“Play me a hundred up?”

Shelton shook his head, stammered out his sorrow, and was about to go.

The gentleman called Mabbey, plaintively feeling the places where his moustaches joined his pink and glossy cheeks, asked with an air of some surprise,

“What’s your general game, then?”

“I really don’t know,” said Shelton.

The gentleman called Mabbey chalked his cue, and, moving his round, knock-kneed legs in their tight trousers, took up his position for the stroke.

“What price that?” he said, as he regained the perpendicular; and his well-fed eyes followed Shelton with sleepy inquisition.  “Curious dark horse, Shelton,” they seemed to say.

Shelton hurried out, and was about to run down the lower lawn, when he was accosted by another person walking in the sunshine—­a slight-built man in a turned-down collar, with a thin and fair moustache, and a faint bluish tint on one side of his high forehead, caused by a network of thin veins.  His face had something of the youthful, optimistic, stained-glass look peculiar to the refined English type.  He walked elastically, yet with trim precision, as if he had a pleasant taste in furniture and churches, and held the Spectator in his hand.

“Ah, Shelton!” he said in high-tuned tones, halting his legs in such an easy attitude that it was impossible to interrupt it:  “come to take the air?”

Shelton’s own brown face, nondescript nose, and his amiable but dogged chin contrasted strangely with the clear-cut features of the stained-glass man.

“I hear from Halidome that you’re going to stand for Parliament,” the latter said.

Shelton, recalling Halidome’s autocratic manner of settling other people’s business, smiled.

“Do I look like it?” he asked.

The eyebrows quivered on the stained-glass man.  It had never occurred to him, perhaps, that to stand for Parliament a man must look like it; he examined Shelton with some curiosity.

“Ah, well,” he said, “now you mention it, perhaps not.”  His eyes, so carefully ironical, although they differed from the eyes of Mabbey, also seemed to ask of Shelton what sort of a dark horse he was.