“Perhaps our interest in you,” he replied.  “By-the-bye, I have just seen him perform a quixotic but a very fine action,” Francis said.  “He stopped a carter from thrashing his horse; knocked him down, bought the horse from him and sent it home.”

She was mildly interested.

“An amiable side of my father’s character which no one would suspect,” she remarked.  “The entire park of his country house at Hatch End is given over to broken-down animals.”

“I am one of those,” he confessed, “who find this trait amazing.”

“And I am another,” she remarked coolly.  “If any one settled down seriously to try and understand my father, he would need the spectacles of a De Quincey, the outlook of a Voltaire, and the callousness of a Borgia.  You see, he doesn’t lend himself to any of the recognised standards.”

“Neither do you,” he said boldly.

She looked away from him across the House, to where Sir Timothy was talking to a man and woman in one of the ground-floor boxes.  Francis recognised them with some surprise—­an agricultural Duke and his daughter, Lady Cynthia Milton, one of the most, beautiful and famous young women in London.

“Your father goes far afield for his friends,” Francis remarked.

“My father has no friends,” she replied.  “He has many acquaintances.  I doubt whether he has a single confidant.  I expect Cynthia is trying to persuade him to invite her to his next party at The Walled House.”

“I should think she would fail, won’t she?” he asked.

“Why should you think that?”

Francis shrugged his shoulders slightly.

“Your father’s entertainments have the reputation of being somewhat unique,” he remarked.  “You do not, by-the-bye, attend them yourself.”

“You must remember that I have had very few opportunities so far,” she observed.  “Besides, Cynthia has tastes which I do not share.”

“As, for instance?”

“She goes to the National Sporting Club.  She once travelled, I know, over a hundred miles to go to a bull fight.”

“On the whole,” Francis said, “I am glad that you do not share her tastes.”

“You know her?” Margaret enquired.

“Indifferently well,” Francis replied.  “I knew her when she was a child, and we seem to come together every now and then at long intervals.  As a debutante she was charming.  Lately it seems to me that she has got into the wrong set.”

“What do you call the wrong set?”

He hesitated for a moment.

“Please don’t think that I am laying down the law,” he said.  “I have been out so little, the last few years, that I ought not, perhaps, to criticise.  Lady Cynthia, however, seems to me to belong to the extreme section of the younger generation, the section who have a sort of craze for the unusual, whose taste in art and living is distorted and bizarre.  You know what I mean, don’t you—­black drawing-rooms, futurist wall-papers, opium dens and a cocaine box!  It’s to some extent affectation, of course, but it’s a folly that claims its victims.”