Phoebe had not been very kind when she heard that her sister had been so bold-faced, as she called it, to ask Jack Collingwood for a sketch. “You don’t know what interpretation might be put on such a thing,” she said, and indeed it was difficult to conjecture. But Clara attributed this severity as much to the tooth-ache as anything else, and in point of fact when the picture arrived, Phoebe, who would usually spend a quarter of an hour over untying a knot rather than cut it, fetched the scissors in less than no time, and behaved as if string was not a precious metal.

“It is kind of him,” said Clara. “See what a size, Phoebe! though perhaps that may be mostly frame. I know artists are very fond of putting large frames on small pictures. Oh, dear, there is another wrapper!”

The picture was undone at last, and the two peered closely into it, in the approved fashion. Suddenly Clara started.

“It’s the corner down by the mill,” she said, “where the foot-bridge crosses the river. And the dog, it’s like the—Phoebe, it’s Miss Avesham and her dog on the bridge by the mill.”

Phoebe looked in silence a moment.

“What is to be done?” she said, at length. “Dear me, yes, it’s a wonderful likeness, too. She is just like that when she laughs.”

“What is the picture called?” said Clara, opening the note which had accompanied it. “In Danger. Oh! I see. The dog is shaking itself, and her dress is in danger of getting wet. How very clever!”

Phoebe had ceased looking at the picture: an affair far more momentous and interesting occupied her.

“I wonder what it all means?” she began.

“You see the dog is shaking itself,” repeated Clara, “and the danger is——”

“I know that,” said Phoebe. “But is there, if I can say so without being indelicate, do you think there is some understanding between Miss Avesham and Mr. Collingwood? Do you suppose she stood to him? How interesting it would have been if we had happened to stroll down there one of these last days and seen him working!”

“No doubt you are right, Phoebe,” said her sister.

“It is not proved,” said Phoebe, modestly, “but it seems likely. We can’t ask Miss Avesham about it, and really I dare not ask Mrs. Collingwood.”

“Ask her about what?”

“Don’t you see, Clara, it would be so awkward if this picture had been done without Miss Avesham’s knowledge. Dear me, how well he has caught the likeness! There is a ring at the bell. Go to the window, Clara, keeping yourself out of sight, and see who it is.”

Clara ambushed herself behind the curtains and peeped out.

“Colonel Raymond,” she whispered, “and Mrs. Raymond.”

“Dear me, how fortunate! I dare say he will know. Tell them to bring tea at once, Clara. He is sure to have heard of it if his cousin is engaged. We’ll show him the picture, and see if he says anything.”

Colonel Raymond was in the best spirits that afternoon. He had at last been to call on the Aveshams, and he considered that his reception had been most gratifying. He had also explained at length his relationship to Jeannie, and all was satisfactory. Mrs. Raymond also was in cheerful mood, since the Colonel had decided to pay calls this afternoon, and thus there was no brisk walk for the children.

The talk soon turned on the picture exhibition, and Clara announced with modest pride that Jack Collingwood had sent them a contribution.

“Indeed, we were just unpacking it when you came, Colonel Raymond,” she said, “and I should so much like to hear your opinion on it.”

The Colonel adjusted his eye-glasses.

“Why, God bless my soul,” he exclaimed, “it’s Jeannie Avesham! Constance, do come here, and look at Mr. Collingwood’s picture of cousin Jeannie. Wonderfully good, is it not? Just caught the look she has when she smiles. She looked just like that at some little story I told her this afternoon, do you remember? And the dog, Toby, dear little Toby. How like! How like!”

Now this was not quite all that the Miss Cliffords wanted, and as Colonel Raymond raised his head from the examination of the picture, Clara looked slyly at him. Now, when Miss Clara looked sly there was no possibility of missing it; she looked sly, so to speak, with both hands. The Colonel, as he often said himself, was a prodigious observer, and he observed this.

“Eh, what?” he began, and then suddenly a possible explanation of Miss Clifford’s slyness came into his mind. He was that nature of a man who cannot endure that any one should know a piece of gossip or news before himself, and he determined to appear at least as well-informed as Miss Clifford.

“Ah, you have heard something, too, Miss Clifford,” he said. “How these things get about! But I understand it is to be kept quite secret at present, except from a few friends. Of course, as long as they are in mourning, you understand—a great thing for the Collingwoods. Puts them among the county families.”

The Colonel raised his eyes to the ceiling as he had observed Miss Fortescue do when she wished to say no more on any subject, and congratulated himself on having come with credit out of that.

Both the Miss Cliffords were bursting with curiosity to hear more, but the Colonel tactfully led the subject round to other topics.

“Jack Collingwood was at Oxford with our cousin Arthur,” he said. “Wonderful place, Oxford; I spent a night there once. It would suit you and your literary tastes, Miss Clara. Plenty of opportunity for study. What a treat, by the way, you gave us in the last Observer. Brought tears into my eyes, positively brought tears into my eyes.”

All this was very pleasant, but, the great secret told, the Miss Cliffords were almost anxious for the departure of the Colonel, for they longed to talk the matter over. The Colonel, however, was in good spirits, and he remained.

“Very pleasant and gratifying it is,” he said, “to see our cousins settling down here in the way they are doing. Jeannie—Miss Jeannie said to me to-day how much she enjoyed Wroxton.”

“And does Mr. Avesham enjoy it?” asked Miss Clara.

“I have not had an opportunity of talking to him about it,” said the Colonel, cautiously, “but he must be hard to please—he must be hard to please if he does not. What a charming life for a young man! For a few hours a day he has his work, but when that is over, what a choice! A game of whist at the club, the pleasures of the home circle—and Miss Fortescue is such a shrewd, delightful woman—or, or, if his tastes are literary, a call at Villa Montrose.”

“Colonel Raymond, how can you!” cried Miss Clara, in an ecstasy of slyness; “how can you be so wicked?”

“Robert likes his joke,” said Mrs. Raymond, in her colourless voice. “He means nothing, Miss Clifford. Do you, Robert?”

“My dear, a soldier sticks to what he says,” said the Colonel. “Or Arthur can come and take a glass of the best port in the Midlands with Constance and me.”

“Does Mr. Avesham play whist well?” asked Phoebe.

Now if the Colonel was proud of anything it was of his reputation as a whist-player. He was known to play for “points,” a term vague to the Miss Cliffords, but with an undefined air of extravagance and recklessness about it. And though Arthur had never at present had the privilege of playing with the Colonel, the latter answered without a pause.

“A good, sound game,” he said. “Perhaps he does not know the subtleties of the thing as well as—as well as some old stagers at it, but with an hour or two of Cavendish a day, which I am not ashamed myself to spend on it, he will develop into a fine player. Wonderful man, Cavendish. Whist is not a game, it is an institution, a national institution.”

And the Colonel’s chest became gigantic.

“The work of a lifetime,” he went on. “To know whist is the work of a lifetime, and a lifetime not ill-spent. Put it on my tombstone, Constance. I shall not be ashamed of having it on my tombstone, ‘He played a good hand,’ or, let us be more modest, ‘He played a fair hand.’ And now we must tear ourselves away; we must really tear ourselves away. My old cronies will be waiting for me at the club and wondering where I am.”

“Colonel Raymond is very fond of his whist,” said his wife, as if this was a fact new to every one.

It was the custom at Villa Montrose to show the departing guests as far as the front door, not because there was any fear of their appropriating some small articles on their way out, but with the idea of speeding them, and as soon as the door was closed Phoebe and Clara hurried back to the drawing-room.

“Well, it’s the most exciting thing I ever heard,” said Clara, “and how clever of you to have guessed it, Phoebe. I should never have thought of it.”

“Anyhow we can make our minds quite easy about sending the picture to the exhibition,” said Phoebe. “I suppose Miss Avesham told the Colonel about it this afternoon. We must be sure to mention it to no one, Clara. It is only to be known in the family at present. Dear me, the Honourable Jeannie Avesham to Mr. John Collingwood! Does he become Honourable, too? I rather think he does.”

“There has not been a wedding in Wroxton for years,” said Miss Clara, “at least not in our circle. I wonder what Mrs. Collingwood will say to it. The Colonel said the Collingwoods would become a county family. How I shall long to see the ‘County families’ for next year.”

“It would make a pretty subject for a poem next time you are in the mood,” said Phoebe, “the artist painting his love.”

“I had thought of that,” said Clara, with conscious pride. “It will be difficult, but I shall try.”

“I should recommend the sonnet form,” said Phoebe, as if she was choosing a wallpaper.

Clara considered a moment.

“I saw it as a lyric,” she said, “with a little refrain like some of Miss Rossetti’s. ‘Jeannie, my Jeannie,’ would be a pretty line.”

“No, you must mention no name, at any rate till the engagement is announced,” said Phoebe. “It would never do.”

“Perhaps you are right, Phoebe,” said the other. “I shall have a long morning’s work to-morrow.”

Colonel Raymond in the meantime was walking to the club, rather quicker than his wont was. He almost forgot to look interesting for the benefit of passers-by in the excitement of possessing, and that by his own extraordinary shrewdness, this family secret. His momentary annoyance at not having been the first to have known it was quite overscored by the delight in knowing it now, and though he had been disposed for a second or two to consider it to be an impertinence on the part of Miss Clifford that she, though indirectly, was the channel by which it was conveyed to him, the anticipation of the flutter he would make at the club more than compensated for it. He did not intend to state the secret boldly; he proposed to make a mystery of it, to set people on the right track, and to refuse to answer any questions, for if there was anything which the Colonel loved more than imparting information in a superior manner, it was withholding it in the same irritating way.

“I’m late, gentlemen,” he cried, in his bluff, hearty manner, as he entered the smoking-room; “I’m late, and I cry ‘peccavi.’ But it is not altogether my fault. I’ve been down to my cousins at Bolton Street. They all are very much excited about it, of course—why, God bless my soul, I nearly let it out.”

From a dark corner of the room there came a faint rustle as of a paper being folded, and Arthur Avesham’s head looked over the corner of the Evening Standard, and back again, as quick as a lizard.

“But we must get to our whist,” continued the unconscious Colonel. “Whist and wine wait for no men. And, talking of wine, get me a glass of port, a glass of port, waiter, and bring it to the card-room, and don’t be all day about it.”

The Colonel was in rather an exaltÉ mood that afternoon, and just as his bluff heartiness was a shade more pronounced than usual, so, too, were his immoderate remarks when his partner did not play his hand correctly.

“Bumble-puppy, the merest bumble-puppy,” he roared. “It’s a pure waste of time playing a game like this, and to call it whist is a profanation. Ah, we got the odd, did we? I thought you had secured it. You ought to have. That puts us out. Well, well, as we are out I’ll say no more about it, but we ought never to have got out. It’s the principle of the thing for which I go.”

A few minutes later the door opened and Arthur entered. The Colonel was sorting his hand with angry snorts and growls and did not notice his entrance. Arthur took a seat near the table where the Colonel and his party were playing, and watched the game.

The Colonel finished sorting his hand first, and was not apparently satisfied with it, for he burst into a torrent of angry recrimination.

“A waiting game; is this what they call a waiting game? Really, partner, you seem to fall asleep upon your cards. And there are other gentlemen waiting here to take a hand.” And he turned an inflamed face upon Arthur.

There was dead silence. If the Colonel had seen the ghost of his late noble relative he could not have been more shocked. Only a few minutes before he had been talking of his afternoon with his cousins in Bolton Street, and here was one of them, to whom he had never spoken, at his elbow. Arthur seldom went to the club, and, as luck would have it, he and the Colonel had not met before. The Colonel knew Arthur by sight, but the mischief was that Arthur did not know the Colonel. The man of war was up a tree, and his old cronies knew it. But he faced the position like a volunteer.

“Charming little place you have in Bolton Street,” he said, without fury in his voice. “I was there this afternoon paying my respects to Miss Avesham and Miss Fortescue—I and my wife. We claim connection with you through the Fortescues. Ah, my partner has played. A good card, sir, a very good card.”

Arthur glanced at the Colonel, then at the other players. They all exhibited an unnatural absorption in their cards, and he guessed that this connection of his, whoever he might be, was in a tight place. He waited till the hand was over, which concluded the rubber.

The Colonel got up impatiently.

“You will take my hand,” he said, “and give these gentlemen another rubber; I have got to go: I must get home early to-night,” and he fairly ran from the room.

Arthur was known to the other three present, and, as he took his seat:

“Who on earth is that God-forsaken man?” he asked.

Mr. Newbolt alone found his tongue.

“Colonel Raymond is his name,” he said.

“I wonder why he went away?” said Arthur, and a sound like a chuckle came from Mr. Hewson.