has broken someone's fast, or someone has broken his own at
the expense of breakfast.... What's that?"

"One of the ladies coming down, sir." Mr. Norbury would not, in the
ordinary way of business, have mentioned this fact, but it had given him
a resource against a pleasantry he found distasteful. Of course, _he_
knew the event of the morning. Yet he could not say to the
gentleman:--"A truce to jocularity. A man was shot dead half a mile off
last night, and the body has been taken to the Keeper's Lodge."

The lady coming downstairs was Miss Constance Smith-Dickenson, also
uninformed about the tragedy. She had made her first appearance
yesterday afternoon, and had looked rather well in a pink-figured muslin
at dinner. The interchanges between this lady and the Hon. Percival,
referring chiefly to the fact that no one else was down, seemed to have
no interest for Mr. Norbury; who, however, noted that no new topic had
dawned upon the conversation when he returned from a revision of the
breakfast-table. The fact was that the Hon. Percival had detected in
Miss Dickenson a fossil, and was feeling ashamed of a transient interest
in her last night, when she had shown insight, under the
guidance--suppose we say--of champagne. Her bloom had gone off, too, in
a strange way, and bloom was a _sine qua non_ to this gentleman. She for
her part was conscious of a chill having come between them, she having
retired to rest the evening before with a refreshing sensation that all
was not over--could not be--when so agreeable a man could show her such
marked attention. That was all she would endorse of a very temperate
Vanity's suggestions, mentally crossing out an s at the end of
"attention." If you have studied the niceties of the subject, you will
know how much that letter would have meant.

A single lady of a particular type gets used to this sort of thing. But
her proper pride has to be kept under steam, like a salvage-tug in
harbour when there is a full gale in the Channel. However, she is better
off than her great-great-aunts, who were exposed to what was described
as _satire_. Nowadays, presumably, Man is not the treasure he was, for a
good many women seem to scrat on cheerfully enough without him. Or is it
that in those days he was the only person employed on his own valuation?

In the period of this story--that is to say, when our present veterans
were schoolboys--the air was clearing a little. But the smell of the
recent Georgi