-chair.
"How hot and tired you look!"

"I am tired to death, Evelyn. I went to London in May a comparatively
young man. Aunt Mary said I ought to go, and so, of course, I went. I
have come back not only sadder and wiser--that I would try to bear--but
visibly aged."

He took off his hat as he spoke, and wearily pushed back the hair from
his forehead. Lady Mary looked at him over her spectacles with grave
scrutiny. She had not seen her nephew for many months, and she was not
pleased with what she saw. His face looked thin and worn, and she even
feared she could detect a gray hair or two in the light hair and
mustache. His tired, sarcastic eyes met hers.

"I was afraid you would think I had _gone off_," he said, half shutting
his eyes in the manner habitual to him. "I fear I took your exhortations
too much to heart, and overworked myself in the good cause."

"A season is always an exhausting thing," said Lady Mary; "and I dare
say London is very hot now."

"Hot! It's more than hot. It is a solemn warning to evil-doers; a
foretaste of a future state."

"I suppose everybody has left town by this time?" continued Lady Mary,
who often found it necessary even now to ignore parts of her nephew's
conversation.

"By everybody I know you mean _one_ family. Yes, they are gone. Left
London to-day. Consequently, I also conveyed my remains out of town,
feeling that I had done my duty."

"Where is Ralph?" asked Evelyn, rising, dimly conscious that Charles and
his aunt were conversing in an unknown tongue, and feeling herself _de
trop_.

"I left him in the shrubbery. A stoat crossed the road before the
horse's nose as we drove up, and Ralph, who seems to have been specially
invented by Providence for the destruction of small vermin, was in
attendance on it in a moment. I had seen something of the kind before,
so I came on."

Evelyn laid down her work, and went across the lawn, and round the
corner of the house, in the direction of the shrubbery, from which the
voice of her lord and master "rose in snatches," as he plunged in and
out among the laurels.

"And how is Lord Hope-Acton?" continued Lady Mary, with an air of
elaborate unconcern. "I used to know him in old days as one of the best
waltzers in London. I remember him very slim and elegant-looking; but I
suppose he is quite elderly now, and has lost his figure? or so some one
was saying."

"Not lost, but gone before, I should say, to judge by appearances," said
Char