suffering too strong for her,
and because the truth was really untellable. Even to herself it seemed
slightly ridiculous, and she knew the poor General would take it so
dreadfully to heart.

"I don't know about coming up this season. The garden is looking so
beautiful, and there's Bee's engagement. The dear child is so happy!"

The General caressed a whisker with his white hand.

"Ah yes," he said--"young Tharp! Let's see, he's not the eldest. His
brother's in my old corps. What does this young fellow do with himself?"

Mrs. Pendyce answered:

"He's only farming. I'm afraid he'll have nothing to speak of, but he's
a dear good boy. It'll be a long engagement. Of course, there's nothing
in farming, and Horace insists on their having a thousand a year. It
depends so much on Mr. Tharp. I think they could do perfectly well on
seven hundred to start with, don't you, Charles?"

General Pendyce's answer was not more conspicuously to the point than
usual, for he was a man who loved to pursue his own trains of thought.

"What about George?", he said. "I met him in the hall as I was coming
in, but he ran off in the very deuce of a hurry. They told me at Epsom
that he was hard hit."

His eyes, distracted by a fly for which he had taken a dislike, failed
to observe his sister-in-law's face.

"Hard hit?" she repeated.

"Lost a lot of money. That won't do, you know, Margery--that won't do. A
little mild gambling's one thing."

Mrs. Pendyce said nothing; her face was rigid: It was the face of a
woman on the point of saying: "Do not compel me to hint that you are
boring me!"

The General went on:

"A lot of new men have taken to racing that no one knows anything about.
That fellow who bought George's horse, for instance; you'd never have
seen his nose in Tattersalls when I was a young man. I find when I go
racing I don't know half the colours. It spoils the pleasure. It's no
longer the close borough that it was. George had better take care what
he's about. I can't imagine what we're coming to!"

On Margery Pendyce's hearing, those words, "I can't imagine what we're
coming to," had fallen for four-and-thirty years, in every sort of
connection, from many persons. It had become part of her life, indeed,
to take it for granted that people could imagine nothing; just as the
solid food and solid comfort of Worsted Skeynes and the misty mornings
and the rain had become part of her life. And it was only the fact that
her nerv