aid Aylmer.

'She's a wonderful-looking woman--like an old photograph, or someone in
a book,' said Edith.

'Do you care for books?'

'Oh, yes, rather. I've just been discovering Bourget. Fancy, I didn't
know about him! I've just read _Mensonges_ for the first time.'

'Oh yes. Rather a pompous chap, isn't he? But you could do worse than
read _Mensonges_ for the first time.'

'I _have_ done worse. I've been reading Rudyard Kipling for the last
time.'

'Really! Don't you like him? Why?'

'I feel all the time, somehow, as if he were calling me by my Christian
name without an introduction, or as if he wanted me to exchange hats
with him,' she said. 'He's so fearfully familiar with his readers.'

'But you think he keeps at a respectful distance from his characters?
However--why worry about books at all, Mrs Ottley? Flowers, lilies of
the field, and so forth, don't toil or spin; why should they belong to
libraries? I don't think you ever ought to read--except perhaps
sometimes a little poetry, or romance.... You see, that is what you
are, rather, isn't it?'

'Don't you care for books?' she answered, ignoring the compliment. 'I
should have thought you loved them, and knew everything about them. I'm
not sure that I know.'

'You know quite enough, believe me,' he answered earnestly. 'Oh, don't
be cultured--don't talk about Lloyd George! Don't take an intelligent
interest in the subjects of the day!'

'All right; I'll try not.'

She turned with a laugh to Captain Willis, who seemed very depressed.

'I say, you know,' he said complainingly, 'this is all very well. It's
all very well no doubt. But I only ask one thing--just one. Is this
cricket? I merely ask, you know. Just that--is it cricket; what?'

'It isn't meant to be. What's the matter?'

'Why, I'm simply fed up and broken-hearted, you know. Hardly two words
have I had with you tonight, Mrs Ottley.... I suppose that chap's
awfully amusing, what? I'm not amusing.... I know that.'

'Oh, don't say that. Indeed you are.' she consoled him.

'Am I though?'

'Well, you amuse _me_!'

'Right!' He laughed cheerily. He always filled up pauses with a laugh.

CHAPTER V

The Surprise

Certainly Mrs Mitchell on one side and Captain Willis on the other had
suffered neglect. But they seemed to become hardened to it towards the
end of dinner....

'I have a boy, too,' Aylmer remarked irrelevantly, 'rather a nice chap.
Just ten.'

Though only by the merest, s