he's not having you. Macartney,
saving your presence, doesn't like being had."

Lucy laughed, and turned to wave her hand to Lancelot in the entry of
the conservatory.

"That your boy?" Urquhart asked. "But of course. He's like you--with
his father's tricks." That was perfectly true. "And that's your
sister, of course. Pretty woman. Like you too--you in a sunset."
Perfect unconsciousness robbed this open commentary of sting.

Upon him drifted Mrs. Worthington, like a peony in the tideway.
Urquhart bowed. "Your servant, ma'am."

She cried, "Hullo, Jimmy, you here?"

"Where else?"

"Why, I thought you were in Switzerland."

"So I was," he said. "All among the curates. But I came back--because
they didn't." He turned to Lucy. "And because I was asked here."

She asked him, "Were you ski-ing? Lancelot will grudge you that."

He told her, "I was not. No lonely death for me. I was bobbing it. You
are swept off by dozens at a time there--by fifties in a cave. It's
more cheerful." Then he seemed to remark something which he thought
she ought to know. "Jimmy. You heard her? Now Macartney and I are both
called James. But who ever made a Jimmy of him?" She was annoyed with
him--the man seemed to suppose she could be pleased by crabbing
James--and glad of Margery Dacre, a mermaid in sea-green, who swam in
with apologies--due to Macartney's abhorrent eyeglass upon her. And
then they all went in to their archumpelygo, where Crewdson and his
ladies were waiting for them, _rari nautes_.

Lucy's table--she was between the Judge and Urquhart and had Mabel,
Worthington and Miss Bacchus before her--at once took the mastery.
Urquhart fixed Crewdson with his eye and thenceforward commanded
him. James's eyeglass, speechless with horror over Lady Bliss's
shoulder, glared like a frosty moon.

Miss Bacchus, it seems, was his old acquaintance. She too called him
Jimmy, and drove at him with vigour. He charged her not to rally him,
and being between the two sisters, talked to both of them at once, or
rather started them off, as a music-hall singer starts the gallery,
and then let them go on over his head.

They talked of Wycross, Lucy's house in the country, compared it with
Peltry, which Mabel deprecated as a barrack, and came to hear of
Urquhart's house in the New Forest. It was called Martley Thicket.
Urquhart said it was a good sort of place. "I've made an immense
lake," he said, with his eyes so very wide that Miss Bacchus said