down for the shooting every
autumn to the Towers, and took full advantage of the permission. This
year had been an exceptionally good year for the pheasants; in _their_
sense, not the sportsman's. For all the Colonel's friends were in the
Crimea, and the October shooting had been sadly neglected except by the
poachers. He was now back from the Crimea, but was not good for much
shooting or fox-hunting, having been himself shot through the lungs in
September at the Battle of the Alma, and invalided home. But he was
already equal to the duties of host to a shooting-party, and though he
could kill nothing himself, he could hear others do so, and could smell
the nice powder. The Earl hated this sort of thing, and was glad to get
out of the way till the worst of it was over.

Widow Thrale kept modestly outside this review of the Castle's
economies, but when they were exhausted referred again to her wish to
get a sight of old Mrs. Picture, putting her anxiety to do so entirely
on the shoulders of the Granny, of whose wish to know that the old woman
had borne the rest of her journey she made the most. She was not
prepared to confess to her own curiosity, so she used this device to
absolve her of confession. Cousin Keziah also was really a little
inquisitive, so an arrangement was easily made that these two should
walk over to the Towers on the afternoon of next day, pledging old
Stephen to the keeping of a careful eye on the pranks of the two young
conspirators against the peace and well-being of maturity, whose
business it is to know the exact amount of licence permissible to youth,
and at what point the restraint of a firm enunciation of high moral
principles becomes a necessity.

* * * * *

If Widow Thrale had been seized with a sudden mania for the improbable,
and had set her wits to work their hardest on a carefully chosen typical
example, could she have lighted on one that would have imposed a greater
strain on human powers of belief than the presence, a mile off, of her
mother, dead fifty years since? How improbable it would have seemed to
her that her aunt and her kith and kin of that date should fall so
easily dupes to a fraud! How improbable that folk should be so content
without inquiry, on either side of the globe; that her own mother should
remain so for years, and should even lack curiosity, when she returned
to England, to seek out her sister's grave; an instinctive tribute, one