* * * *

However, I do not think we need record it further.

Mr. Woods listened in a sort of a daze. Adele Haggage and Hugh Van
Orden were conversing in low tones at one end of the table; the
Colonel was eating his luncheon, silently and with a certain air of
resignation; and so Billy Woods was left alone to attend and marvel.

The ideas they advanced seemed to him, for the most part, sensible.
What puzzled him was the uniform gravity which they accorded
equally--as it appeared to him--to the discussion of the most pompous
platitudes and of the most arrant nonsense. They were always serious;
and the general tone of infallibility, Billy thought, could be
warranted only by a vast fund of inexperience.

But, in the main, they advocated theories he had always
held--excellent theories, he considered. And he was seized with an
unreasonable desire to repudiate every one of them.

For it seemed to him that every one of them was aimed at Margaret's
approval. It did not matter to whom a remark was ostensibly
addressed--always at its conclusion the speaker glanced more or
less openly toward Miss Hugonin. She was the audience to which they
zealously played, thought Billy; and he wondered.

I think I have said that, owing to the smallness of the house-party,
luncheon was served in the breakfast-room. The dining-room at Selwoode
is very rarely used, because Margaret declares its size makes a meal
there equivalent to eating out-of-doors.

And I must confess that the breakfast-room is far cosier. The room, in
the first place, is of reasonable dimensions; it is hung with Flemish
tapestries from designs by Van Eyck representing the Four Seasons, but
the walls and ceiling are panelled in oak, and over the mantel carved
in bas-relief the inevitable Eagle is displayed.

The mantel stood behind Margaret's chair; and over her golden head,
half-protectingly, half-threateningly, with his wings outstretched to
the uttermost, the Eagle brooded as he had once brooded over Frederick
R. Woods. The old man sat contentedly beneath that symbol of what
he had achieved in life. He had started (as the phrase runs) from
nothing; he had made himself a power. To him, the Eagle meant that
crude, incalculable power of wealth he gloried in. And to Billy Woods,
the Eagle meant identically the same thing, and--I am sorry to say--he
began to suspect that the Eagle was really the audience to whom Miss
Hugonin's friends so zealously play