‘I’d hit him in the eye!’ cried Ferdy, with cheerful inconsequence.

‘Perhaps you don’t care to come to dinner at half-past seven,’ the girl said to Miss Steet; ‘but I should be very glad—I’m all alone.’

‘Thank you so much. All alone, really?’ murmured the governess.

‘Why don’t you get married? then you wouldn’t be alone,’ Geordie interposed, with ingenuity.

‘Children, you are really too dreadful this evening!’ Miss Steet exclaimed.

‘I shan’t get married—I want to have the hounds,’ proclaimed Geordie, who had apparently been much struck with his brother’s explanation.

‘I will come down afterwards, about half-past eight, if you will allow me,’ said Miss Steet, looking conscious and responsible.

‘Very well—perhaps we can have some music; we will try something together.’

‘Oh, music—we don’t go in for music!’ said Geordie, with clear superiority; and while he spoke Laura saw Miss Steet get up suddenly, looking even less alleviated than usual. The door of the room had been pushed open and Lionel Berrington stood there. He had his hat on and a cigar in his mouth and his face was red, which was its common condition. He took off his hat as he came into the room, but he did not stop smoking and he turned a little redder than before. There were several ways in which his sister-in-law often wished he had been very different, but she had never disliked him for a certain boyish shyness that was in him, which came out in his dealings with almost all women. The governess of his children made him uncomfortable and Laura had already noticed that he had the same effect upon Miss Steet. He was fond of his children, but he saw them hardly more frequently than their mother and they never knew whether he were at home or away. Indeed his goings and comings were so frequent that Laura herself scarcely knew: it was an accident that on this occasion his absence had been marked for her. Selina had had her reasons for wishing not to go up to town while her husband was still at Mellows, and she cherished the irritating belief that he stayed at home on purpose to watch her—to keep her from going away. It was her theory that she herself was perpetually at home—that few women were more domestic, more glued to the fireside and absorbed in the duties belonging to it; and unreasonable as she was she recognised the fact that for her to establish this theory she must make her husband sometimes see her at Mellows. It was not enough for her to maintain that he would see her if he were sometimes there himself. Therefore she disliked to be caught in the crude fact of absence—to go away under his nose; what she preferred was to take the next train after his own and return an hour or two before him. She managed this often with great ability, in spite of her not being able to be sure when he would return. Of late however she had ceased to take so much trouble, and Laura, by no desire of the girl’s own, was enough in the confidence of her impatiences and perversities to know that for her to have wished (four days before the moment I write of) to put him on a wrong scent—or to keep him at least off the right one—she must have had something more dreadful than usual in her head. This was why the girl had been so nervous and why the sense of an impending catastrophe, which had lately gathered strength in her mind, was at present almost intolerably pressing: she knew how little Selina could afford to be more dreadful than usual.