that it’s a wonder she took the trouble to save them, gave her city lots that turned out as good as gold mines.  She sold too soon, or she’d have made millions—­ and died of a broken heart, they say, when she found out that mistake.  Still, she left a lot more than it’s good for a young fellow to start life with.  That boy has been to Cambridge, and now he loafs about the club, pretends to be a judge of wine, gets every stitch of clothes from London—­pah!” Mr Pennycuick spat neatly and with precision over the verandah floor into a flower-bed.  “But these mother’s darlings—­you know them.  If Mrs Dalzell could see him now, I daresay she’d be bursting with pride, for there’s no denying that he’s a smart-looking chap.  But his father would be ashamed of him.”

“Daddy dear!” Mary gently expostulated.

“So he would.  An idle, finicking scamp, that’ll never do an honest stroke of work as long as he lives.  And I wish Deb wouldn’t waste her time listening to his nonsense.  Isn’t it about time to be getting ready for dinner, Moll?”

Mary looked through a window at a clock indoors, and said it was.  Guthrie hailed the news, and rose to his feet.

But not yet did he escape.  His host, hoisting himself heavily out of his big cane chair, hollowed like a basin under his vast weight, extended a detaining hand.

“Come with me to my office a minute,” he half whispered.  “I’d like to show you something.”

With apparent alertness, but sighing inwardly, Guthrie followed his host to the room in the old part of the house which he called his office.  Mr Pennycuick carefully shut the door, opened a desk full of drawers and pigeon-holes, and brought forth a bit of cardboard with a shy air.  He had never shown it to his family, and doubtless would not have shown it now if he had not been growing old and soft and sentimental.  It was a prim and niggling little water-colour drawing of English Redford—­a flat facade, with swallows as big as condors flying over the roofs, and dogs that could never have got through any doorway gambolling on the lawn in front.  A tiny ‘Mary Carey’ in one corner was just, and only just, visible to the naked eye.

“This was done for me, when we were both young, by her—­your aunt,” said Mr Pennycuick, gloating upon his treasure over Guthrie’s shoulder.

“Not my aunt,” explained Guthrie.  “I don’t know what relation, but a long way farther off than that.  I am only a very small Carey, you know, sir.”

Mr Pennycuick testily intimated, as before, that to be a Carey at all was enough for him.  It was his excuse for these confidences, of which he was half ashamed.