Montague was very anxious to get a “line” on Charlie Carter; for he had not been prepared for the startling promptness with which this young man had fallen at Alice’s feet.  It was so obvious, that everybody was smiling over it—­he was with her every minute that he could arrange it, and he turned up at every place to which she was invited.  Both Mrs. Winnie and Oliver were quite evidently complacent, but Montague was by no means the same.  Charlie had struck him as a good-natured but rather weak youth, inclined to melancholy; he was never without a cigarette in his fingers, and there had been signs that he was not quite proof against the pitfalls which Society set about him in the shape of decanters and wine-cups:  though in a world where the fragrance of spirits was never out of one’s nostrils, and where people drank with such perplexing frequency, it was hard to know where to draw a line.

“You won’t find my place like Havens’s,” Siegfried Harvey had said.  “It is real country.”  Montague found it the most attractive of all the homes he had seen so far.  It was a big rambling house, all in rustic style, with great hewn logs outside, and rafters within, and a winding oak stairway, and any number of dens and cosy corners, and broad window-seats with mountains of pillows.  Everything here was built for comfort—­there was a billiard-room and a smoking-room, and a real library with readable bogles and great chairs in which one sank out of sight.  There were log fires blazing everywhere, and pictures on the walls that told of sport, and no end of guns and antlers and trophies of all sorts.  But you were not to suppose that all this elaborate rusticity would be any excuse for the absence of attendants in livery, and a chef who boasted the cordon bleu, and a dinner-table resplendent with crystal and silver and orchids and ferns.  After all, though the host called it a “small” place, he had invited twenty guests, and he had a hunter in his stables for each one of them.

But the most wonderful thing about “The Roost” was the fact that, at a touch of a button, all the walls of the lower rooms vanished into the second story, and there was one huge, log-lighted room, with violins tuning up and calling to one’s feet.  They set a fast pace here—­the dancing lasted until three o’clock, and at dawn again they were dressed and mounted, and following the pink-coated grooms and the hounds across the frost-covered fields.

Montague was half prepared for a tame fox, but this was pared him.  There was a real game, it seemed; and soon the pack gave tongue, and away went the hunt.  It was the wildest ride that Montague ever had taken—­over ditches and streams and innumerable rail-fences, and through thick coverts and densely populated barnyards; but he was in at the death, and Alice was only a few yards behind, to the immense delight of the company.  This seemed to Montague the first real life he had met, and he thought to himself that these full-blooded and high-spirited men and women made a “set” into which he would have been glad to fit—­save only that he had to earn his living, and they did not.