In spite of the Colonel’s settled belief to the contrary, it was perfectly true that, only a few months before his noble relative’s death, Lord Avesham had bought for Arthur, his second and youngest son, a share in Dalton’s brewery in Wroxton, and he was to enter it the following September. Arthur had only just left Oxford, where he had shown an almost remarkable distaste for study and indoor pursuits, and a notable tendency not to get through examinations, and he had welcomed the brewing prospect with alacrity. The diplomatic service, for which he had been intended, had been closed to him through a couple of complete and graceful failures to compete successfully with other candidates, and he had dreaded that the gradual closing of other careers would eventually land him, as it had landed so many others at that terrific faute de mieux, the bar. But he was a very long way from being stupid, or, rather, his stupidity was of most limited range—of the range, in fact, which only comprises dates, idioms, and fractions, a small part of life. But when this is joined to an incapacity for continued application amounting almost to paralysis, parents and guardians would be wise to reconcile themselves to the fact that those they love will never distinguish themselves in examinations. As long, however, as that immemorial fiction is held up before the young that the object of education is to enable them to rise triumphant over examinations, so long dateless and unidiomatic children will continue to feel that they are disappointing their parents.

Arthur had felt this at times acutely, but he had accepted the inevitable with such success that Lord Avesham had written him down indifferent as well as stupid, and what was in him only great sweetness of disposition was credited as insouciance. This, too, he bore with equanimity.

Harry, his elder brother, his sister Jeannie, and himself had come down to Morton with their mother’s sister, Miss Fortescue, for the funeral of Lord Avesham, and were going to stop there for the present. Family councils had to be held about the disposition of affairs, and one was in progress on a morning in July about a fortnight after Lord Avesham’s death. They were certainly a remarkably handsome family, and it was to be conjectured that their good looks were a heritage—perhaps the most valuable he had bequeathed them—from their father, for the most that could be said about Miss Fortescue was that she had a very intellectual expression. Harry was sitting at a desk with some papers before him, and Miss Fortescue was sitting opposite him. Jeannie lounged in the window-seat, and Arthur was resting in a chair so long and low that all that could be seen of him was one knee and a great length of shin. The position of his head was vaguely indicated by a series of smoke-rings which floated upward at regular intervals. There had been silence for a few moments. Miss Fortescue’s baritone voice broke it.

“Well, what does the black sheep say?” she demanded.

There was a pause in the smoke-rings, and a voice asked:

“Do you mean me, Aunt Em?”

“Yes, dear. Whom else?”

“I thought you must mean me, but it was best to ask,” said the voice. “I’m not a black sheep, though; I’m only a sheep.”

Harry looked up, half impatient, half amused.

“Oh, Arthur, don’t be so trying,” he said. “It really rests with you.”

“I’d much sooner somebody settled for me,” said Arthur.

“But they won’t; speak, sheep,” said Miss Fortescue.

The chair in which Arthur sat creaked, and he struggled to his feet.

“I’m not good at speaking,” he said; “but if you insist—well, it’s just this. Harry, you’re a brick to suggest that we should all live here, but I think you’re wrong about it. In the first place, we’re poor, and if you keep Morton open we shall be all tied here, and we sha’n’t be able to fill the house with people, and we shall not be able to keep up the shooting; and here we shall be with this great shell over our heads, like bluebottles or some other mean insect which lives in palaces. In the second place, you will probably marry, and that will cramp you still further. In the third—this is from my own point of view, purely—if I live here, I know perfectly well that, with the best intentions in the world, on wet mornings when I don’t want to go out, and on fine ones when I do, I shall persuade myself that I am far from well, and not go to Wroxton and the brewery. Fourthly, you yourself will miss not being in London horribly. You’d bore yourself to death here. But you’re a brick for suggesting it. And—and that’s all.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“So the sheep has spoken,” said Jeannie. “Well done, sheep. But I thought you said you were wholly indifferent?”

“I know I did. But you drove me into a corner.”

Miss Fortescue looked at Arthur approvingly.

“For so stupid a boy, you have glimmerings of sense,” she said.

“Oh, I’m a sharp fellow,” said Arthur.

“Really, Arthur, I think you are,” said Harry. “Mind, my offer holds perfectly good, but I do think there is something in what you say.”

Arthur stood looking from one to the other, with his head a little on one side, like a dog who has done its trick. Unlike Jeannie and his brother, he was fair, with blue eyes and an extraordinarily pleasant face.

“Well, them’s my sentiments,” he said. “Your turn, Jeannie.”

“I know it is,” said Jeannie. “And what’s to happen to me, Arthur?” she demanded.

Arthur groaned slightly.

“I’ve done all that can be expected of me,” he said. “My turn is over.”

Jeannie jumped up.

“Oh, I know,” she said. “I’ll come and keep house for you in Wroxton, Arthur, and Harry shall come down to stay with us from Saturday till Monday, and we’ll go up to stay with him from—from Monday till Saturday.”

“A lot of beer shall I brew,” remarked Arthur. “Why, you could swim in it.”

“I don’t much see you living at Wroxton, Jeannie,” said Harry.

“Why not? I should enjoy it. I really should. And we’ll give high teas to the Canons.”

“I think you’d loathe it before a month was out,” repeated Harry.

“Indeed I shouldn’t.”

“We’re all so terribly unselfish, and that’s what is the matter with us,” said Arthur. “First Harry wants to let us all live with him, and then I want to live in that funny little town in order to attend to my work, and then Jeannie wants to live with me. Aunt Em, give us a contribution, and try, oh, try to be selfish; I’m sure you can.”

“Well, I think Jeannie is right,” said Miss Fortescue. “You would hate not living in London, Harry, and I think the best thing you can do is to have a flat there, quite small, so that one or two of us could very kindly come to stay with you, and let Jeannie and Arthur live in Wroxton. Then shut Morton up, or let it. You’d better let it, if possible. It’s only for a year or two, till you’ve paid these iniquitous Radical taxes. And then when you open it again you can order your beer from Arthur.”

Arthur gave a sigh of relief.

“Well, that’s settled,” he said. “Jeannie, let’s go into Wroxton this afternoon and see the householders or the house-agents. Oh, Aunt Em, what is going to happen to you?”

“You are all so unselfish,” said Miss Fortescue, “that I thought one of you might have considered that. But I was wrong.”

A general shout went up of “Come and live with me,” and the meeting was adjourned for the time being.

Miss Fortescue, who has hitherto been distinguished from the Aveshams generally by the fact of her not being at all good-looking, had her compensations. She was, in the first place, exceedingly musical, and had about as much wits as two generations of Aveshams put together. She was a woman of very pronounced opinions, and though you might accidentally hit upon a subject on which she had neither opinion nor knowledge, she would be happy to pronounce an opinion on it offhand with such conviction as to lead you to suppose she knew something about it. If you could induce her to argue about the said subject, though you might suspect that she knew nothing whatever of it, yet you would find it difficult to bring her ignorance home to her. She would glean facts from her opponent as she went along, and use them against him with telling effect. But it was next to impossible to make her argue; if you disagreed with her she would raise her eyes to the ceiling as if commending you and your benighted condition to the hands of Providence. Like most clever people, she was sublimely inconsistent, and though she genuinely abhorred the idea of the death of any living creature, she would eat flesh meals without any qualms whatever. This may be partly accounted for by the fact that she hated fads as much as the death of innocent animals, and it was her dislike of vegetarians rather than of a vegetable diet which led to so sturdy an inconsistency. The same contradictions appeared in her views about horses and dogs, and she would rather walk to the station, though hating bodily exercise, than have out a horse which was bursting with condition and make it pull her. The same misplaced tenderness applied to her treatment of dogs, and her own pug was an object-lesson of unwholesome overfeeding.

Miss Fortescue on this particular morning had been glad, by her last ungenerous speech, to shift the responsibility of her future on to other shoulders, or, at any rate, to delay her own decision. She wanted, in the main, to determine what she wanted to do, and she could not quite make up her mind. She had lived with the Aveshams since her sister’s death some eight years ago, and they all took it for granted (herself included) that she would continue to go on living with them. For herself, she would have much preferred to have gone on living at Morton, but she saw and admitted at once the reasonableness of Arthur’s view. Her own income, with the exception of a hundred a year for dress and travelling (she dressed with notable cheapness, and never travelled), she was prepared to give into the household coffers of whatever branch of the family she decided to live with, and as Jeannie and Arthur had only six hundred a year between them, the extra five hundred she could give constituted an additional reason for joining them. As far as the advantages of town and country were to be considered, she had no great choice, for she felt no thrill in the stir and noise of streets, and the sweet silence of the country could not appreciably add to her habitual tranquility. She hardly ever went out unless she was obliged, and on those occasions she took short walks very slowly, and it was something of a mystery, even to those who knew her best, as to what she did with the hours. She would always disappear soon after breakfast, and if asked at lunch what she had been doing, she would say, “Working.” Then, if pressed further as to what her work had been, she would only raise her eyes to the ceiling, and the incident would close. This raising of the eyes had long been a danger-signal to the Aveshams. It implied that Miss Fortescue was unwilling to say more on this particular subject, and any further questions would only evoke severe remarks on their inquisitiveness.

Jeannie and Arthur rode into Wroxton that afternoon and made the house-agent an unhappy man. The house they required had to be near the brewery, and also at the top of the hill, which, to begin with, was impossible, as the brewery was at the very bottom of the town. Then it had to have a good smoking-room, two nice sitting-rooms—one for Jeannie and one for Miss Fortescue, in case she decided to join them—a drawing-room and a dining-room (the size of these was really important), and four excellent bed-rooms away from the street. To be away from the street implied a garden, which must be private, sunny, and extensive. That red brick should be the material of the house was desirable, but not absolutely essential. The offices, Miss Fortescue insisted, should be really good, for they made all the difference to servants, whom one was bound to consider before one’s self. A small stable only, but well-aired and dry, was required, and the rent of the whole must be exceedingly low.

The only point which presented no difficulty were the offices. Jeannie and Arthur were both quite vague as to what offices meant, but in the half dozen houses they saw that afternoon there was always some other radical defect. In one they found that an apartment described as a sitting-room was more probably intended to be a house-maid’s cupboard; in another they disgraced themselves by thinking that the kitchen was the scullery. A third case was more complicated, for Jeannie remembered about a still-room, and had to explain to an antiquated caretaker what a still-room was. What made the afternoon more bewildering was that they both fell in love with every house they saw, and thought it would do excellently with a little alteration. Then came the question of rents: they had hoped to find something for about a hundred and twenty pounds a year, and the only consolation, as Arthur said, was that at corresponding prices, if Morton was let, it ought to bring to Harry an income of about fifty thousand a year, which certainly seemed a satisfactory sum.

“Why, if it would let for that,” he exclaimed, with a sudden splendid thought, “we should be rich enough to live in it ourselves, and not let it at all!” But the mention of Morton roused the house-agent to rather greater interest in his impracticable clients. It appeared that there were other houses which might also be had, and, if the gentleman would give his card, he had no doubt that the owner of 8 Bolton Street would let them look at it. He had long been thinking of letting it, though it was not exactly in the market. It had a garden, it was built of red brick, and the offices, as usual, were quite palatial.

“A different stamp of house, sir, quite a different stamp of house.”

“And a different stamp of rent?” asked Arthur.

“The gentleman is very anxious to get desirable tenants,” was the hopeful reply.

“Come, Jeannie,” said Arthur, “it will end in our taking Buckingham Palace, but no matter!”

The house in question was not exactly Buckingham Palace, but within a few days they had taken it. Miss Fortescue drove in to see it, after bargaining that the horses should not be used again the whole of the next day, and made up her mind to stay at any rate with Jeannie and Arthur for a week or two. As she also indicated which room she would like, and chose a paper for it, it may be supposed that her “week or two” did not mean less than a week or two. The rent was not prohibitive, the garden was charming, and the house stood in a side street where traffic was scanty, and looked out behind over the Cathedral, and Canons, as Jeannie said, really hung on their garden wall like ripe plums.

A day or two later rumours began to spread through Wroxton that the Aveshams were coming to live there, and discussion raged. The Colonel knew they were not.

“I should think, sir, if my cousins were coming, I should not be the last to be informed of it. Just gossip, sir, mere gossip—I wonder at you for paying any attention to it.”

He scarcely even believed the assurance of the owner of 8 Bolton Street that he had actually let it to them, for as soon as Mr. Hanby had left the room he burst out:

“A mere ruse, sir, to send up the value of the house, by making people think that the aristocracy want to take it. Transparent, transparent!”

But he did not feel quite easy about it in the depths of his gallant heart, and he thought again how awkward it would be if it were true.