“My dear mother, I do bet.”

“Oh, George, I hope not much!  For goodness’ sake, don’t tell your father; he’s like all the Pendyces, can’t bear a risk.”

“My dear mother, I’m not likely to; but, as a matter of fact, there is no risk.  I stand to win a lot of money to nothing.”

“But, George, is that right?”

“Of course it’s all right.”

“Oh, well, I don’t understand.”  Mrs. Pendyce dropped her eyes, a flush came into her white cheeks; she looked up again and said quickly:  “George, I should like just a little bet on your horse—­a real bet, say about a sovereign.”

George Pendyce’s creed permitted the show of no emotion.  He smiled.

“All right, mother, I’ll put it on for you.  It’ll be about eight to one.”

“Does that mean that if he wins I shall get eight?”

George nodded.

Mrs. Pendyce looked abstractedly at his tie.

“I think it might be two sovereigns; one seems very little to lose, because I do so want him to win.  Isn’t Helen Bellew perfectly charming this morning!  It’s delightful to see a woman look her best in the morning.”

George turned, to hide the colour in his cheeks.

“She looks fresh enough, certainly.”

Mrs. Pendyce glanced up at him; there was a touch of quizzicality in one of her lifted eyebrows.

“I mustn’t keep you, dear; you’ll be late for the shooting.”

Mr. Pendyce, a sportsman of the old school, who still kept pointers, which, in the teeth of modern fashion, he was unable to employ, set his face against the use of two guns.

“Any man,” he would say, “who cares to shoot at Worsted Skeynes must do with one gun, as my dear old father had to do before me.  He’ll get a good day’s sport—­no barndoor birds” (for he encouraged his pheasants to remain lean, that they might fly the better), “but don’t let him expect one of these battues—­sheer butchery, I call them.”

He was excessively fond of birds—­it was, in fact, his hobby, and he had collected under glass cases a prodigious number of specimens of those species which are in danger of becoming extinct, having really, in some Pendycean sort of way, a feeling that by this practice he was doing them a good turn, championing them, as it were, to a world that would soon be unable to look upon them in the flesh.  He wished, too, that his collection should become an integral part of the estate, and be passed on to his son, and his son’s son after him.

“Look at this Dartford Warbler,” he would say; “beautiful little creature—­getting rarer every day.  I had the greatest difficulty in procuring this specimen.  You wouldn’t believe me if I told you what I had to pay for him!”