stess:

"So she wouldn't come?--the little wife?"

"I gave her every chance. She scorned us."

"You mean--'she funked us.' Have you any idea, I wonder, how alarming
you are?"

Lady Dunstable exclaimed impatiently:

"People represent me as a kind of ogre. I am nothing of the kind. I only
expect everybody to play up."

"Ah, but you make the rules!" laughed Sir Luke. "I thought that young
woman might have been a decided acquisition."

"She hadn't the very beginnings of a social gift," declared his
companion. "A stubborn and rather stupid little person. I am much afraid
she will stand in her husband's way."

"But suppose you blow up a happy home, by encouraging him to come
without her? I bet anything she is feeling jealous and ill-used. You
ought--I am sure you ought--to have a guilty conscience; but you look
perfectly brazen!"

Sir Luke's banter was generally accepted with indifference, but on this
occasion it provoked Lady Dunstable. She protested with vehemence that
she had given Mrs. Meadows every chance, and that a young woman who was
both trivial and conceited could not expect to get on in society. Sir
Luke gathered from her tone that she and Mrs. Meadows had somewhat
crossed swords, and that the wife might look out for consequences. He
had been a witness of this kind of thing before in Lady Dunstable's
circle; and he was conscious of a passing sympathy with the
pleasant-faced little woman he remembered at Crosby Ledgers. At the same
time he had been Rachel Dunstable's friend for twenty years; originally,
her suitor. He spent a great part of his life in her company, and her
ways seemed to him part of the order of things.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Meadows walked back to the house. He had been a good deal
nettled by Lady Dunstable's last remark to him. But he had taken pains
not to show it. Doris might say such things to him--but no one else.
They were, of course, horribly true! Well--quarrelling with Lady
Dunstable was amusing enough--when there was room to escape her. But how
would it be in the close quarters of a yacht?

On his way through the garden he fell in with Miss Field--Mattie Field,
the plump and smiling cousin of the house, who was apparently as
necessary to the Dunstables in the Highlands, as in London, or at Crosby
Ledgers. Her role in the Dunstable household seemed to Meadows to be
that of "shock absorber." She took all the small rubs and jars on her
own shoulde