ave a miss
with the spot ball.

"I win to-night," he said.

He was a small, very upright man, with a face that seemed to belong to
his generation, and an expression seldom to be seen on a man younger
than seventy. Life had not puzzled him; his moderate intellect had taken
it as he found it, and, through the magic glasses of good health, good
temper, and great wealth, judged existence a desirable thing and quite
easy to conduct with credit. "You only want patience and a brain," he
always declared. Sir Walter wore an eyeglass. He was growing bald, but
preserved a pair of grey whiskers still of respectable size. His face,
indeed, belied him, for it was moulded in a stern pattern. One had
guessed him a martinet until his amiable opinions and easy-going
personality were manifested. The old man was not vain; he knew that a
world very different from his own extended round about him. But he was
puzzle-headed, and had never been shaken from his life-long complacency
by circumstances. He had been disappointed in love as a young man, and
only married late in life. He had no son, and was a widower--facts that,
to his mind, quite dwarfed his good fortune in every other respect. He
held the comfortable doctrine that things are always levelled up, and he
honestly believed that he had suffered as much sorrow and disappointment
as any Lennox in the history of the race.

His only child and her cousin, Henry Lennox, had been brought up
together and were of an age--both now twenty-six. The lad was his
uncle's heir, and would succeed to Chadlands and the title; and it had
been Sir Walter's hope that he and Mary might marry. Nor had the youth
any objection to such a plan. Indeed, he loved Mary well enough; there
was even thought to be a tacit understanding between them, and they
grew up in a friendship which gradually became ardent on the man's part,
though it never ripened upon hers. But she knew that her father keenly
desired this marriage, and supposed that it would happen some day.

They were, however, not betrothed when the war burst upon Europe, and
Henry, then one-and-twenty, went from the Officers' Training Corps to
the Fifth Devons, while his cousin became attached to the Red Cross and
nursed at Plymouth. The accident terminated their shadowy romance and
brought real love into the woman's life, while the man found his
hopes at an end. He was drafted to Mesopotamia, speedily fell sick of
jaundice, was invalided to India, and, on