“That young fellow in the new suit has just come back from Europe,” said a man to his wife and daughter.  “He seems to have had a good time.”

“Papa,” the daughter leaned forward, and spoke in a low voice, “I heard him say ’Lord Mount Dunstan said Lady Anstruthers and Miss Vanderpoel were at the garden party.’  Who do you suppose he is?”

“Well, he’s a nice young fellow, and he has English clothes on, but he doesn’t look like one of the Four Hundred.  Will you have pie or vanilla ice cream, Bessy?”

Bessy—­who chose vanilla ice cream—­lost all knowledge of its flavour in her absorption in the conversation at the next table, which she could not have avoided hearing, even if she had wished.

“She bent over the bed and laughed—­just like any other nice girl—­and she said, ’You are at Stornham Court, which belongs to Sir Nigel Anstruthers.  Lady Anstruthers is my sister.  I am Miss Vanderpoel.’  And, boys, she used to come and talk to me every day.”

“George,” said Nick Baumgarten, “you take about seventy-five bottles of Warner’s Safe Cure, and rub yourself all over with St. Jacob’s Oil.  Luck like that ain’t healthy!”

. . . . .

Mr. Vanderpoel, sitting in his study, wore the interestedly grave look of a man thinking of absorbing things.  He had just given orders that a young man who would call in the course of the evening should be brought to him at once, and he was incidentally considering this young man, as he reflected upon matters recalled to his mind by his impending arrival.  They were matters he had thought of with gradually increasing seriousness for some months, and they had, at first, been the result of the letters from Stornham, which each “steamer day” brought.  They had been of immense interest to him—­these letters.  He would have found them absorbing as a study, even if he had not deeply loved Betty.  He read in them things she did not state in words, and they set him thinking.

He was not suspected by men like himself of concealing an imagination beneath the trained steadiness of his exterior, but he possessed more than the world knew, and it singularly combined itself with powers of logical deduction.

If he had been with his daughter, he would have seen, day by day, where her thoughts were leading her, and in what direction she was developing, but, at a distance of three thousand miles, he found himself asking questions, and endeavouring to reach conclusions.  His affection for Betty was the central emotion of his existence.  He had never told himself that he had outgrown the kind and pretty creature he had married in his early youth, and certainly his tender care for her and pleasure in her simple goodness had never wavered, but Betty had given him a companionship which had counted greatly in the sum of his happiness.  Because imagination was not suspected in him, no one knew what she stood for in his life.  He had no son; he stood at the