lusive!'

"Has something been settled about Mrs. Hughs?" she asked abruptly.

"What does your father say this morning?"

Thyme picked up her portfolio of drawings, and moved towards the door.

"Father's hopeless. He hasn't an idea beyond referring her to the
S.P.B."

She was gone; and Hilary, with a sigh, took his pen up, but he wrote
nothing down ....

Hilary and Stephen Dallison were grandsons of that Canon Dallison, well
known as friend, and sometime adviser, of a certain Victorian novelist.
The Canon, who came of an old Oxfordshire family, which for three hundred
years at least had served the Church or State, was himself the author of
two volumes of "Socratic Dialogues." He had bequeathed to his son--a
permanent official in the Foreign Office--if not his literary talent, the
tradition at all events of culture. This tradition had in turn been
handed on to Hilary and Stephen.

Educated at a public school and Cambridge, blessed with competent, though
not large, independent incomes, and brought up never to allude to money
if it could possibly be helped, the two young men had been turned out of
the mint with something of the same outward stamp on them. Both were
kindly, both fond of open-air pursuits, and neither of them lazy. Both,
too, were very civilised, with that bone-deep decency, that dislike of
violence, nowhere so prevalent as in the upper classes of a country whose
settled institutions are as old as its roads, or the walls which insulate
its parks. But as time went on, the one great quality which heredity and
education, environment and means, had bred in both of
them--self-consciousness--acted in these two brothers very differently.
To Stephen it was preservative, keeping him, as it were, in ice
throughout hot-weather seasons, enabling him to know exactly when he was
in danger of decomposition, so that he might nip the process in the bud;
it was with him a healthy, perhaps slightly chemical, ingredient, binding
his component parts, causing them to work together safely, homogeneously.
In Hilary the effect seemed to have been otherwise; like some slow and
subtle poison, this great quality, self-consciousness, had soaked his
system through and through; permeated every cranny of his spirit, so that
to think a definite thought, or do a definite deed, was obviously
becoming difficult to him. It took in the main the form of a sort of
gentle desiccating humour.

"It's a remarkable thing," he had one day