slight illness."

"A dreary spot just now," Sir Henry observed, "but the air's all right.
Are you a sea-fisherman, by any chance, Mr. Lessingham?"

"I have done a little of it," the visitor confessed. Sir Henry's face
lit up. He drew from his pocket a small, brown paper parcel.

"I don't mind telling you," he confided as he cut the string, "that I
don't think there's another sport like it in the world. I have tried
most of them, too. When I was a boy I was all for shooting, perhaps
because I could never get enough. Then I had a season or two at Melton,
though I was never much of a horseman. But for real, unadulterated
excitement, for sport that licks everything else into a cocked hat, give
me a strong sea rod, a couple of traces, just enough sea to keep on the
bottom all the time, and the codling biting. Look here, did you ever see
a mackerel spinner like that?" he added, drawing one out of the parcel
which he had untied. "Look at it, all of you."

Lessingham took it gingerly in his fingers. Philippa, a little
ostentatiously, turned her back upon the two men and took up a
newspaper.

"Lady Cranston does not sympathize with my interest in any sort of sport
just now," Sir Henry explained good-humouredly. "All the same I argue
that one must keep one's mind occupied somehow or other."

"Quite right, Dad!" Nora agreed. "We must carry on, as the Colonel says.
All the same, I did hope you'd come down in a new naval uniform, with
lots of gold braid on your sleeve. I think they might have made you an
admiral, Daddy, you'd look so nice on the bridge."

"I am afraid," her father replied, with his eyes glued upon the spinner
which Lessingham was holding, "that that is a consideration which didn't
seem to weigh with them much. Look at the glitter of it," he went on,
taking up another of the spinners. "You see, it's got a double swivel,
and they guarantee six hundred revolutions a minute."

"I must plead ignorance," Lessingham regretted, "of everything connected
with mackerel spinning."

"It's fine sport for a change," Sir Henry declared. "The only thing is
that if you strike a shoal one gets tired of hauling the beggars in.
By-the-by, has Jimmy been up for me, Philippa? Have you heard whether
there are any mackerel in?"

Philippa raised her eyebrows.

"Mackerel!" she repeated sarcastically.

"Have you any objection to the fish, dear?" Sir Henry enquired blandly.

Philippa made no reply. Her husband frowned and turned