“Did you quarrel with Timothy?” Clara asked shyly.  “I should have.”

Mrs. Durrant came back from the window.

“It gets later and later,” she said, sitting upright, and looking down the table.  “You ought to be ashamed—­all of you.  Mr. Clutterbuck, you ought to be ashamed.”  She raised her voice, for Mr. Clutterbuck was deaf.

“We are ashamed,” said a girl.  But the old man with the beard went on eating plum tart.  Mrs. Durrant laughed and leant back in her chair, as if indulging him.

“We put it to you, Mrs. Durrant,” said a young man with thick spectacles and a fiery moustache.  “I say the conditions were fulfilled.  She owes me a sovereign.”

“Not before the fish—­with it, Mrs. Durrant,” said Charlotte Wilding.

“That was the bet; with the fish,” said Clara seriously.  “Begonias, mother.  To eat them with his fish.”

“Oh dear,” said Mrs. Durrant.

“Charlotte won’t pay you,” said Timothy.

“How dare you ...” said Charlotte.

“That privilege will be mine,” said the courtly Mr. Wortley, producing a silver case primed with sovereigns and slipping one coin on to the table.  Then Mrs. Durrant got up and passed down the room, holding herself very straight, and the girls in yellow and blue and silver gauze followed her, and elderly Miss Eliot in her velvet; and a little rosy woman, hesitating at the door, clean, scrupulous, probably a governess.  All passed out at the open door.

“When you are as old as I am, Charlotte,” said Mrs. Durrant, drawing the girl’s arm within hers as they paced up and down the terrace.

“Why are you so sad?” Charlotte asked impulsively.

“Do I seem to you sad?  I hope not,” said Mrs. Durrant.

“Well, just now.  You’re not old.”

“Old enough to be Timothy’s mother.”  They stopped.

Miss Eliot was looking through Mr. Clutterbuck’s telescope at the edge of the terrace.  The deaf old man stood beside her, fondling his beard, and reciting the names of the constellations:  “Andromeda, Bootes, Sidonia, Cassiopeia. ...”

“Andromeda,” murmured Miss Eliot, shifting the telescope slightly.

Mrs. Durrant and Charlotte looked along the barrel of the instrument pointed at the skies.

“There are millions of stars,” said Charlotte with conviction.  Miss Eliot turned away from the telescope.  The young men laughed suddenly in the dining-room.

“Let me look,” said Charlotte eagerly.

“The stars bore me,” said Mrs. Durrant, walking down the terrace with Julia Eliot.  “I read a book once about the stars. ...  What are they saying?” She stopped in front of the dining-room window.  “Timothy,” she noted.

“The silent young man,” said Miss Eliot.

“Yes, Jacob Flanders,” said Mrs. Durrant.

“Oh, mother!  I didn’t recognize you!” exclaimed Clara Durrant, coming from the opposite direction with Elsbeth.  “How delicious,” she breathed, crushing a verbena leaf.