or something fairly common!  But Dartie—­there wasn’t another in the directory!  One might as well have been named Morkin for all the covert it afforded!  So matters went on, till one day in the middle of January the silver-roan palfrey and its rider were missing at the tryst.  Lingering in the cold, he debated whether he should ride on to the house:  But Jolly might be there, and the memory of their dark encounter was still fresh within him.  One could not be always fighting with her brother!  So he returned dismally to town and spent an evening plunged in gloom.  At breakfast next day he noticed that his mother had on an unfamiliar dress and was wearing her hat.  The dress was black with a glimpse of peacock blue, the hat black and large—­she looked exceptionally well.  But when after breakfast she said to him, “Come in here, Val,” and led the way to the drawing-room, he was at once beset by qualms.  Winifred carefully shut the door and passed her handkerchief over her lips; inhaling the violette de Parme with which it had been soaked, Val thought:  ‘Has she found out about Holly?’

Her voice interrupted

“Are you going to be nice to me, dear boy?”

Val grinned doubtfully.

“Will you come with me this morning....”

“I’ve got to see....” began Val, but something in her face stopped him.  “I say,” he said, “you don’t mean....”

“Yes, I have to go to the Court this morning.”  Already!—­that d—–­d business which he had almost succeeded in forgetting, since nobody ever mentioned it.  In self-commiseration he stood picking little bits of skin off his fingers.  Then noticing that his mother’s lips were all awry, he said impulsively:  “All right, mother; I’ll come.  The brutes!” What brutes he did not know, but the expression exactly summed up their joint feeling, and restored a measure of equanimity.

“I suppose I’d better change into a ‘shooter,"’ he muttered, escaping to his room.  He put on the ‘shooter,’ a higher collar, a pearl pin, and his neatest grey spats, to a somewhat blasphemous accompaniment.  Looking at himself in the glass, he said, “Well, I’m damned if I’m going to show anything!” and went down.  He found his grandfather’s carriage at the door, and his mother in furs, with the appearance of one going to a Mansion House Assembly.  They seated themselves side by side in the closed barouche, and all the way to the Courts of Justice Val made but one allusion to the business in hand.  “There’ll be nothing about those pearls, will there?”

The little tufted white tails of Winifred’s muff began to shiver.

“Oh, no,” she said, “it’ll be quite harmless to-day.  Your grandmother wanted to come too, but I wouldn’t let her.  I thought you could take care of me.  You look so nice, Val.  Just pull your coat collar up a little more at the back—­that’s right.”

“If they bully you....” began Val.

“Oh! they won’t.  I shall be very cool.  It’s the only way.”