ce, "I
shall never, never, never move again." His body, lying flat among them,
did for a moment suggest death.

"This is a horrible exhibition, Mr. Hewet!" cried Mrs. Thornbury.

"More cake for us!" said Arthur.

"I assure you there's nothing horrible about it," said Hewet, sitting up
and laying hands upon the cake.

"It's so natural," he repeated. "People with children should make them
do that exercise every night. . . . Not that I look forward to being
dead."

"And when you allude to a grave," said Mr. Thornbury, who spoke almost
for the first time, "have you any authority for calling that ruin
a grave? I am quite with you in refusing to accept the common
interpretation which declares it to be the remains of an Elizabethan
watch-tower--any more than I believe that the circular mounds or
barrows which we find on the top of our English downs were camps. The
antiquaries call everything a camp. I am always asking them, Well then,
where do you think our ancestors kept their cattle? Half the camps in
England are merely the ancient pound or barton as we call it in my part
of the world. The argument that no one would keep his cattle in such
exposed and inaccessible spots has no weight at all, if you reflect that
in those days a man's cattle were his capital, his stock-in-trade, his
daughter's dowries. Without cattle he was a serf, another man's man. . . ."
His eyes slowly lost their intensity, and he muttered a few
concluding words under his breath, looking curiously old and forlorn.

Hughling Elliot, who might have been expected to engage the old
gentleman in argument, was absent at the moment. He now came up holding
out a large square of cotton upon which a fine design was printed in
pleasant bright colours that made his hand look pale.

"A bargain," he announced, laying it down on the cloth. "I've just
bought it from the big man with the ear-rings. Fine, isn't it? It
wouldn't suit every one, of course, but it's just the thing--isn't it,
Hilda?--for Mrs. Raymond Parry."

"Mrs. Raymond Parry!" cried Helen and Mrs. Thornbury at the same moment.

They looked at each other as though a mist hitherto obscuring their
faces had been blown away.

"Ah--you have been to those wonderful parties too?" Mrs. Elliot asked
with interest.

Mrs. Parry's drawing-room, though thousands of miles away, behind a vast
curve of water on a tiny piece of earth, came before their eyes. They
who had had no solidity or anchorage before seem