flesh you may gain more than a passable
figure. Among other things, the ascetic life means straight shooting,
steady hands, and an eye you can depend upon. The overcivilized man who
does nothing to counterbalance his luxuriousness is generally a rotter."

"But what has all this to do with Nasmyth's Canadian?" somebody asked.

Bella waved her cigarette.

"Try to walk a steep moor with him and you'll see. If that's not
sufficient, take the same butt with him when the grouse are coming over."

Suddenly she straightened herself, dropping her foot from the iron and
flinging the cigarette into the fire, as a gray-haired lady entered the
hall. She had been a beauty years ago and now her fragility emphasized
the fineness of her features and the clear pallor of her skin. She was
dressed in a thin black fabric, and her beautifully shaped hands gleamed
unusually white against its somber folds.

"Where's Clarence?" she asked the group collectively, in a voice that was
singularly clear and penetrative. "I haven't seen him for the last
half-hour."

One of the men immediately went in search of him, and the lady crossed
the hall to where Millicent Gladwyne was sitting, for the time being
alone. Millicent had noticed Bella's sudden change of demeanor upon her
hostess's entrance, with something between amusement and faint disgust.
Mrs. Gladwyne was what Bella would have called early-Victorian in her
views, and she would occasionally have been disturbed by the conversation
of some of her son's guests, had she not been a little deaf.

"Sitting quiet?" she said to Millicent, who was a favorite of hers; and
her voice carried farther than she was aware of as she continued: "I
heard the laughter and it brought me down, though I want to tell Clarence
something. I like to see bright faces; but the times have changed since I
was young. We were a little more reserved and not so noisy then."

"A dear old thing! It's a pity she's quite so antediluvian," Bella
remarked to a man at her side.

"Isn't that the natural penalty of being a dear old thing?" laughed her
companion. "There's no doubt we have progressed pretty rapidly of late."

Clarence appeared shortly after this and was gently chidden by his mother
for going out without his hat, because the autumn nights were getting
chilly. A few minutes later, footsteps became audible outside the open
door and Nasmyth entered the hall with Lisle. It was spacious and
indifferently lighted; the ot