r him now with a sense
of novelty.

"Ghastly affair, isn't it?" said the owner contemptuously. "I'd let it
stand empty rather than live in it myself. It reeks of my uncle's
medicine and echoes with his gouty groans. Besides what is there in it
that's really mine?"

Mark who had been thinking what an easy affair life must be for Sir
Charles was struck by his tone of disillusionment. Perhaps all people
who inherited old names and old estates were affected by their awareness
of transitory possession. Sir Charles could not alienate even a piece of
furniture. A middle-aged bachelor and a cosmopolitan, he would have
moved about the corridors and halls of that huge house with less
permanency than Lord Middlesborough who paid him so well to walk about
in it in his stead, and who was no more restricted by the terms of his
lease than was his landlord by the conditions of the entail. Mark began
to feel sorry for him; but without cause, for when Sir Charles came in
sight of Malford Lodge where he lived, he was full of enthusiasm. It was
indeed a pretty little house of red brick, dating from the first quarter
of the nineteenth century and like so many houses of that period built
close to the road, surrounded too on three sides by a verandah of iron
and copper in the pagoda style, thoroughly ugly, but by reason of the
mellow peacock hues time had given its roof, full of personality and
charm. They entered by a green door in the brick wall and crossed a
lawn sloping down to the little river to reach the shade of a tulip tree
in full bloom, where seated in one of those tall wicker garden chairs
shaped like an alcove was an elderly lady as ugly as Priapus.

"There's Lady Landells, who's a poetess, you know," said Sir Charles
gravely.

Mark accepted the information with equal gravity. He was still
unsophisticated enough to be impressed at hearing a woman called a
poetess.

"Mr. Lidderdale is going to have lunch with us, Lady Landells," Sir
Charles announced.

"Oh, is he?" Lady Landells replied in a cracked murmur of complete
indifference.

"He's a great admirer of your poems," added Sir Charles, hearing which
Lady Landells looked at Mark with her cod's eyes and by way of greeting
offered him two fingers of her left hand.

"I can't read him any of my poems to-day, Charles, so pray don't ask me
to do so," the poetess groaned.

"I'm going to show Mr. Lidderdale some of our pictures before lunch,"
said Sir Charles.

Lady Lande