‘Bob’s always rotting me about my pictures,’ Mr Colclough smiled indulgently.  He seemed big enough to eat his friend, and his rich, heavy voice rolled like thunder about the hall.  ’Come along in, will you?’

‘Half-a-second, Ol,’ Mr Brindley called in a conspiratorial tone, and, turning to me:  Tell him the Limerick.  You know.’

‘The one about the hayrick?’

Mr Brindley nodded.

There were three heads close together for a space of twenty seconds or so, and then a fearful explosion happened—­the unique, tremendous laughter of Mr Colclough, which went off like a charge of melinite and staggered the furniture.

‘Now, now!’ a feminine voice protested from an unseen interior.

I was taken to the drawing-room, an immense apartment with an immense piano black as midnight in it.  At the further end two women were seated close together in conversation, and I distinctly heard the name ‘Fuge’.  One of them was Mrs Brindley, in a hat.  The other, a very big and stout woman, in an elaborate crimson garment that resembled a teagown, rose and came to meet me with extended hand.

‘My wife—­Mr Loring,’ said Mr Oliver Colclough.

‘So glad to meet you,’ she said, beaming on me with all her husband’s pleasure.  ’Come and sit between Mrs Brindley and me, near the window, and keep us in order.  Don’t you find it very close?  There are at least a hundred cats in the garden.’

One instantly perceived that ceremonial stiffness could not exist in the same atmosphere with Mrs Oliver Colclough.  During the whole time I spent in her house there was never the slightest pause in the conversation.  Mrs Oliver Colclough prevented nobody from talking, but she would gladly use up every odd remnant of time that was not employed by others.  No scrap was too small for her.

‘So this is the other one!’ I said to myself.  ’Well, give me this one!’

Certainly there was a resemblance between the two, in the general formation of the face, and the shape of the shoulders; but it is astonishing that two sisters can differ as these did, with a profound and vital difference.  In Mrs Colclough there was no coquetterie, no trace of that more-than-half-suspicious challenge to a man that one feels always in the type to which her sister belonged.  The notorious battle of the sexes was assuredly carried on by her in a spirit of frank muscular gaiety—­she could, I am sure, do her share of fighting.  Put her in a boat on the bosom of the lake under starlight, and she would not by a gesture, a tone, a glance, convey mysterious nothings to you, a male.  She would not be subtly changed by the sensuous influences of the situation; she would always be the same plump and earthly piece of candour.  Even if she were in love with you, she would not convey mysterious nothings in such circumstances.  If she were in love with you she would most clearly convey unmysterious and solid somethings.  I was