t come
yet."

"Couldn't we get hold of Wenceslas?" said I. "He's getting five
million a week at the Palliseum. Makes footprints there twice daily in
real snow. The audience are invited to come and tread in them. They
do, too, like anything. Happily, Wenceslas is famed for the size of
his feet. But you can't expect a man to leave--"

"But it can't go on like this," said Daphne.

"My dear, English weather is like your dear self--capable of anything.
Be thankful that we have only snow."

"If it occurred to it to rain icebergs, so that we were compelled willy
or even nilly to give up sleeping out of doors, it would do so. Well,
I'm tired. What about turning out, eh? Light the lanthorn, Jonah, and
give me my dressing-gown."

"If you want to make me really ill," said Daphne, "you'll go on talking
about bathing and sleeping out of doors."

Berry laughed a fat laugh. "My dear," he explained, "I was only
joking."

We were all housed together in an old, old country inn, the inn of
Fallow, which village lies sleeping at the foot of the Cotswold Hills.
We knew the place well. Few stones of it had been set one upon the
other less than three hundred years ago, and, summer and winter alike,
it was a spot of great beauty comparatively little known, too, and far
enough from London to escape most tourists. The inn itself had
sheltered Cromwell, and before his time better men than he had warmed
themselves at the great hearth round which we sat. For all that, he
had given his name to the panelled room. Our bedrooms were as old,
low-pitched and full of beams. The stairs also were a great glory. In
fact, the house was in its way unique. A discreet decorator, too, had
made it comfortable. Save in the Cromwell room, electric light was
everywhere. And in the morning chambermaids led you by crooked
passages over uneven doors to white bathrooms. It was all right.

Hither we had come to spend Christmas and the New Year. By day we
walked for miles over the Cotswolds, or took the car and looked up
friends who were keeping Christmas in the country, not too many miles
away. The Dales of Stoy had been kind, and before the frost came I had
had two days' hunting with the Heythrop. And to-morrow was New Year's
Eve. Four miles the other side of the old market town of Steeple
Abbas, and twenty-one miles from Pallow, stood Bill Manor, where the
Hathaways lived. This good man and his wife Milly were among our
greatest fri