ts and conditions. His youth was back
upon him with its memories, and he had forgotten that he too was now a
Senior. His torrent of thinly disguised execrations was of service to
Lady Gwen; as the original subject of the conversation, just shot, was
naturally forgotten. She had got all the enlightenment she wanted about
him, and was cultivating an artificial lack of interest in his accident.

She was, however, a little dissatisfied with her own success in this
branch of horticulture. Her anxiety had felt itself fully justified till
now by the bare facts of the case. Her longing that this man should not
die was so safe while it seemed certain that he could not live, that she
felt under no obligation to account to herself for it. Analysis of
niceties of feeling in the presence of Death were uncalled for, surely.
But now, with at least a chance of his recovery, she felt that she ought
to be able to think of something else. So she talked of Sardanapalus and
Charles Keane at the Princesses' Theatre--the first a play, the second a
player--and the General, declining more than monosyllables to the
matter-o'-fact gentleman, subsided into wrathful recollection of an
exasperated young Dragoon chafing under canvas beneath an Indian sun,
and panting for news of his regiment in the north, fifty years before.

But such intermittent conversation could not prevent her seeing that
Norbury the butler had handed a visiting-card, pencilled on the back, to
her father, and had whispered a message to him with a sense of its
gravity, and that her father had replied:--"Yes, say I will be there
presently." Nor that--in response to remote inquiry from his Countess
at the end of an avenue of finger-glasses--he had thrown the words
"Hamilton Torrens and the daughter--mother too ill to come--won't come
up to the house until he's fit to move!" all the length of the table.
That her mother had said:--"Oh yes--you know them," perhaps because of
an apologetic manner in her husband for being the recipient of the
message. Also that curiosity and information were mutual in the avenue,
and that next-door neighbours but one were saying:--"What's that?" and
getting no answer.

However, the Intelligence Department did itself credit in the end, and
everyone knew that, immediately on the receipt of sanction from
headquarters, Tom Kettering the young groom had mounted the grey mare--a
celebrity in these parts--and made a foxhunter's short cut across a
stiff count