cted, in a pause, with the disconcerting directness of nineteen.

"I was late already, and you were making me later," Eric answered
patiently. "That night----? Oh, yes."

He detailed Lady Poynter's dinner to his mother and observed an
expression of mixed curiosity and disapproval settling upon his sister's
face.

"Mrs. O'Rane? Sonia Dainton that was? H'm," said Sybil. "And Lady
Barbara Neave. Are you being taken up by _that_ set now, Ricky?"

"I don't quite know what you mean by 'being taken up.' I met them at
dinner. . . . And I lunched with the Crawleighs to-day," he added
without filling in the intervening encounters. "Lady Crawleigh wants me
to go down there next week-end, but I'm too busy; and week-ends simply
wear me out."

"You _have_ made yourself popular with them all at once!" Sybil
commented. "What's Lady Barbara like?"

"Interesting girl," Eric answered, casually.

"Is she anything like what people make her out to be?"

Eric smiled tolerantly.

"I don't know enough of what people make her out to be," he replied.
Sybil was smiling mysteriously and exasperatingly to herself. . . . "Is
the guv'nor working?" he asked his mother.

Eric prowled through the hall to his father's big work-room. Sir Francis
was sitting bent over a litter of papers, with a green eye-shade clamped
to his lined forehead and an ill-smelling corn-cob drooping from beneath
his unassertive grey moustache. In an arm-chair before the fire Geoff
was contentedly dozing with the bog-mud steaming from his boots and a
half-cleaned gun across his knees. By his side an elderly retriever
peered reflectively into the flames and from time to time yawned
silently.

"'Evening, everybody," said Eric. "I've been sent to hunt you off to
dress, father. You asleep, Geoff? If not, how are you?"

Sir Francis pulled off the eye-shade and held out his hand with a wintry
smile. The boy in the arm-chair turned on to his other side and dropped
asleep again with a disgusted grunt.

"He's got about a year to make up," explained Sir Francis. "The Grand
Fleet doesn't do much sleeping. Well, Eric, what news?"

"Everything very much as usual," was the answer.

"Everything's always very much as usual here," said his father, as he
turned out the reading-lamp.

He sighed as he said it, and Eric tried to calculate the number of years
in which he had come down like this for the week-end--to be met, before
the era of motor-cars, by a fat pony and a governess