flattered myself that she was about to give each of us a
rose; she had certainly selected an obvious buttonhole, and appeared to
be seeking its fellow in the basket, when suddenly I saw her looking
past us both and up the road. A middle-aged man was hobbling towards us
in the thinning stream of homing citizens. He did not look one of them;
he wore light clothes and a straw hat which he did not remove in
accosting my companions; and I thought that he looked both hot and cross
as he leant hard upon a serviceable stick.

"Gossiping at the gate, as usual!" he cried, with a kind of rasping
raillery. "Even Mr. Delavoye won't thank you for keeping him standing on
this villainous asphalt till his feet sink in."

"That would have been one for you, Gilly, in the old days," said Uvo.
"Captain Ricardo--Mr. Gillon."

Captain Ricardo also seemed to have heard of me. He overhauled me with
his peevish little eyes, and then said two or three of the bitterest
things about the British forces, regular and irregular, that it ever was
my lot to hear. I made no attempt to reply to them. His wife tried to
present him with the rose which I fancied had been meant for one of us,
and his prompt rejection of the offering only hardened me in that
impression. Then Uvo asked him if he had seen good play at the Oval; and
so the vitriolic stream was diverted into such congenial channels as the
decadence of modern cricket and the calibre of the other members of the
Surrey Club.

"But won't you come in?" concluded the captain in his most forbidding
manner. "I hate this talking at the gate like a pack of servants, but my
wife seems to have a mania for it."

It is only fair to state that Mrs. Ricardo had withdrawn during the
denunciation of the game which her husband spent his useless days in
watching, as Uvo told me when we had declined his inhospitality and were
out of earshot. It was all he did say about Captain Ricardo, and I said
nothing at all. The people were evidently friends of his; at least the
wife was, and it was she who had set me thinking with her first smile.
I was still busy wondering whether, or where, I could have seen her
before.

"It's quite possible," said Uvo, when I had wondered aloud. "I wouldn't
give her away if it weren't an open secret here. But Witching Hill
hasn't called on Mrs. Ricardo since it found out that she was once on
the stage."

"Good Lord!"

"There's another reason, to give the neighbours their due. Ricardo