nly thick skin, an armor-plate impenetrable to snubs.

All the way to Colet House, he maintained a gay facetious flow of
personal talk that made Erebus grind her teeth, now and again suffused
the face of Wiggins with a flush of mortification that dimmed his
freckles, and wrinkled Mrs. Dangerfield's white brow in a distressful
frown. The Terror, serene, impassive, showed no sign of hearing him;
his mind was hard at work on this very serious problem with which he
had been so suddenly confronted. More than once Erebus countered a
witticism with a sharp retort, but with none sharp enough to pierce the
rhinocerine hide of the gallant officer. Once this unbidden but
humorous guest was under their roof, the laws of hospitality denied her
even this relief. She could only treat him with a steely civility.
The steeliness did not check the easy flow of his wit.

He looked oddly out of his place in the drawing-room of Colet House; he
was too new for it. The old, worn, faded, carefully polished
furniture, for the most part of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth
century, seemed abashed in the presence of his floridness. It seemed
to demand the setting of spacious, ornately glittering hotels. Mrs.
Dangerfield liked him less in her own drawing-room than anywhere. When
her eyes rested on him in it, she was troubled by a curious feeling
that only by some marvelous intervention of providence had he escaped
calling in a bright plaid satin tie.

The fact that he was not in his proper frame, though he was not
unconscious of it, did not trouble Captain Baster. Indeed, he took
some credit to himself for being so little contemptuous of the shabby
furniture. In a high good humor he went on shining and shining all
through tea; and though at the end of it his luster was for a while
dimmed by the discovery that he had left his cigarette-case at the inn
and there were no cigarettes in the house, he was presently shining
again. Then the Twins and Wiggins rose and retired firmly into the
garden.

They came out into the calm autumn evening with their souls seething.

"He's a pig--and a beast! We can't let Mum marry him! We _must_ stop
it!" cried Erebus.

"It's all very well to say 'must.' But you know what Mum is: if she
thinks a thing is for our good, do it she will," said the Terror
gloomily.

"And she never consults us--never!" cried Erebus.

"Only when she's a bit doubtful," said the Terror.

"Then she's not doubtful no