s.

"I'm afraid it would be of no use for me to watch; I have never played
cards, and don't understand them in the least."

"You mean you don't know the suits?"

"What are suits?"

"This must be seen to," said Mary; "you don't smoke, you drink nothing
festive, you don't know one card from another; you can't go through
life like this. It's not fair. We won't waste another minute, I'll
teach you the suits now."

She made him fetch a little table, she produced a pack of cards. She
spread them out and she expounded. He was a quick study. By the time
Mr Ffolliot came to take Mary's place he knew all the suits. By the
time Mr Ffolliot had thoroughly confused him by a learned disquisition
on the principles of bridge, Lady Campion's motor was announced, and he
departed in her train.

"Surely Mr Gallup is a very absent-minded person," Miss Bax remarked to
her aunt when they had deposited Eloquent at his door.

"I expect he's shy," said Lady Campion, who was sleepy and not
particularly interested; "but wasn't Mary nice to him?--I do like that
girl--she's so natural and unaffected."

"She always strikes me as being a mere child," said Miss Bax, "so very
unformed; is she out yet, or is she still in the schoolroom?"

Sir George chuckled. "She's on her way out," he said, "and, I fancy,
on her way to an uncommonly good time as well. That girl is a sight to
make an old man young."

"She certainly is handsome," said Miss Bax.

Sir George chuckled again. "Unformed," he repeated, "there's some of
us likes 'em like that."

Eloquent sat long in his orderly little dining-room where the glass of
milk and tray of sandwiches awaited him on the sideboard. His head was
in a whirl. She drank champagne. She gambled. She seemed to think it
was perfectly natural and right to do these things. It probably was if
she thought so. She . . .

Heavens! what an adorable wife she would be for a young Cabinet
Minister.

CHAPTER XXIII

WILLETS

Had Eloquent ever taken the smallest interest in country pursuits he
must have come across Willets, for in that part of the Cotswolds
Willets was as well known as the Marle itself.

A small thick-set man with a hooky nose, and with bright, long-sighted
brown eyes and strong, sensitive hands, wrists tempered and supple as a
rapier, and a tongue that talked unceasingly and well.

Sporting people wondered why Willets, with his multifarious knowledge
of wood and river craft, shou