What did it mean?  Could design lodge in that empty-looking head with its crisp curls, button nose, and diminishing simper?  Was this pic-nic to be made as terrible to the Countess by her putative father as the dinner had been by the great Mel?  The deep, hard, level look of Juliana met the Countess’s smile from time to time, and like flimsy light horse before a solid array of infantry, the Countess fell back, only to be worried afresh by her perfectly unwitting tormentor.

‘His last days?—­without pain?  Oh, I hope so!’ came after a lapse of general talk.

‘Aren’t we getting a little funereal, Mrs. Perkins?’ Lady Jocelyn asked, and then rallied her neighbours.

Miss Carrington looked at her vexedly, for the fiendish Perkins was checked, and the Countess in alarm, about to commit herself, was a pleasant sight to Miss Carrington.

’The worst of these indiscriminate meetings is that there is no conversation,’ whispered the Countess, thanking Providence for the relief.

Just then she saw Juliana bend her brows at another person.  This was George Uplift, who shook his head, and indicated a shrewd-eyed, thin, middle-aged man, of a lawyer-like cast; and then Juliana nodded, and George Uplift touched his arm, and glanced hurriedly behind for champagne.  The Countess’s eyes dwelt on the timid young squire most affectionately.  You never saw a fortress more unprepared for dread assault.

‘Hem!’ was heard, terrific.  But the proper pause had evidently not yet come, and now to prevent it the Countess strained her energies and tasked her genius intensely.  Have you an idea of the difficulty of keeping up the ball among a host of ill-assorted, stupid country people, who have no open topics, and can talk of nothing continuously but scandal of their neighbours, and who, moreover, feel they are not up to the people they are mixing with?  Darting upon Seymour Jocelyn, the Countess asked touchingly for news of the partridges.  It was like the unlocking of a machine.  Seymour was not blythe in his reply, but he was loud and forcible; and when he came to the statistics—­oh, then you would have admired the Countess!—­for comparisons ensued, braces were enumerated, numbers given were contested, and the shooting of this one jeered at, and another’s sure mark respectfully admitted.  And how lay the coveys?  And what about the damage done by last winter’s floods?  And was there good hope of the pheasants?  Outside this latter the Countess hovered.  Twice the awful ‘Hem!’ was heard.  She fought on.  She kept them at it.  If it flagged she wished to know this or that, and finally thought that, really, she should like herself to try one shot.  The women had previously been left behind.  This brought in the women.  Lady Jocelyn proposed a female expedition for the morrow.

‘I believe I used to be something of a shot, formerly,’ she said.

‘You peppered old Tom once, my lady,’ remarked Andrew, and her ladyship laughed, and that foolish Andrew told the story, and the Countess, to revive her subject, had to say:  ‘May I be enrolled to shoot?’ though she detested and shrank from fire-arms.