Sir Bertram, very lithe and debonair in his grey flannels and Panama hat, issued from his front door, whistled to dogs who seemed to come to him from all directions, and, humming snatches of music from an almost forgotten Italian opera, stepped down from the terrace and strolled across the park, keeping as far as possible in the shade of the great oak trees. Arrived at the boundary he vaulted over the stile, exchanged greetings right and left as he passed down the village street, and, turning along the lane to the right, pushed open the gate of the Little House and knocked at the door with his ash stick. At a word of command, the dogs settled down to watch wistfully for the end of their vigil, and Sir Bertram, admitted by an elderly and ungracious-looking domestic, entered the little hall, where he laid his hat and stick upon an oak chest, and afterwards passed into the long, low room, the door of which the maid had opened. A woman lying upon a couch held out both her hands; long, beautiful hands, ringless and almost transparently white. He raised them to his lips and drew a chair to her side.

“You grow more beautiful every day, AngÈle,” was his greeting.

The faintest tinge of colour stole into her ivory pale cheeks, and her eyes filled with a very affectionate light. There was not a single grey thread in her carefully arranged golden-brown hair, yet it was obvious that she was no longer a young woman.

“And you,” she murmured, “I listen here sometimes for your footsteps, and I look down the lane, and I can never tell whether it is you or Gregory who comes. You are a wonderful person, especially considering the life you lead,” she added, with a little grimace.

“My dear,” he said, “we are all the victims of predestination. It is such a comfortable doctrine that I have embraced it permanently. I am a Ballaston and Gregory will be one after me.”

“So far as that is concerned, Henry also is a Ballaston,” she reminded him.

“Henry,” he pointed out, “is not an elder son. It is the elder sons who inherit the full measure of the virtues and vices of our family. Henry, I admit, is a freak, God bless him!”

“So you had my relatives to dine last night,” she remarked. “Tell me what you think of my niece.”

“The most amazingly attractive young person whom I have ever met in my life,” he replied, with what was for him enthusiasm. “As a rule I find extreme youth overpowering—a mixture of shyness and precocity, you know.”

“She is certainly beautiful,” Madame murmured. “Presently I shall get used to her and like to have her near me. Just now I find youth a little depressing. Gregory has altered.”

“It is disappointment,” his father sighed. “He had a stirring adventure, though. I suppose he has told you all about it.”

Madame nodded.

“After all,” she said, “he brought one of the Images home.”

“And a lot of good to us it is,” Sir Bertram remarked ruefully. “There is only one man who could help us, AngÈle.”

“Ralph?”

He nodded silently.

“A most impossible person,” Madame sighed. “His feet are on the earth, his head in the clouds and his heart in China. I am afraid, as a matter of fact, that he utterly disapproved of Gregory’s enterprise.”

“Dog-in-the-mangerish, I call it,” Sir Bertram grumbled. “You can’t say that jewels collected by the priests of a temple, which have been hidden for practically a hundred years, belong now to any one in particular. I am afraid I still have sufficient of the Francis Drake outlook to claim that they belong to whoever has the courage and the wit to find them.”

“The buccaneering spirit,” she observed, with a faint smile of amusement. “You always had it, my dear Bertram. Nothing, I am sure, except the most rigid sense of honour, has kept you from robbing your friends.”

“I shall probably have to end my days doing that,” he sighed, “in some Continental Spa or other. Another year will see us through at Ballaston.”

She took his hand and held it.

“We won’t believe that,” she said softly. “Something must happen.”

“I don’t exactly see what.”

“You ought to have married,” she declared. “When I think of the young women—heaps of them with any amount of money—who were in love with you! You ought to have married again.”

“I had the best reason in the world, dear AngÈle, for remaining single,” he replied. “We won’t speak of that.”

She turned her head towards the window and her beautiful eyes were for a moment a little less clear. The window looked out on to a very pleasant strip of garden, almost of the cottage variety, crowded with flowers and with a long, narrow pergola still hung with roses. Inside, the room itself, with its grey walls and hangings, its few French etchings, the cabinet of choice china, seemed to possess also some measure of the distinction of its owner.

“Bring me my mirror and vanity case from the table, please, Bertram,” she begged. “Smoke, if you will. You will find your own make of cigarettes there.”

He did her bidding, his head almost touching the ceiling of the low room when he rose to his feet. Madame busied herself with a very exquisite little gold case, peering at herself meanwhile in the mirror.

“I have an idea,” Sir Bertram remarked, as he lit a cigarette, “that your brother dislikes me.”

“Why?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I suppose he has every reason to, AngÈle, from a brother’s point of view, and most other people’s, too.”

“If any other person said that to me,” she rejoined quietly, “I should be very angry with them indeed. You have given me all that I have had worth having in life—more than I ever dared to hope for. You give me now what keeps me alive.”

He took her fingers in his and held them. They were interrupted by the entrance of a maid who brought a little tea table to her mistress’ side; a very dainty affair, with a Queen Anne silver teapot and two SÈvres cups, thin bread and butter, cream and lemon.

“Miss Besant still going on all right?” he enquired, as soon as they were alone again.

“She is good after her fashion,” Madame acknowledged. “She is a discontented creature with queer humours, and the usual moodiness of the unmarried girl of thirty. God knows I’m trying enough! One can’t blame her if she gets jumpy sometimes. She does her best.”

“And Sir James,” he enquired; “has he been down this week?”

“He comes again on Monday,” she answered. “I am keeping up everything—massage, baths and diet. As a matter of fact, I think I’m getting fat. Anna and Miss Besant were quite out of breath when they carried me to my room last night. What do you think?”

She threw on one side the beautiful lace wrap which had covered her, and her eyes looked towards him with faint, provocative enquiry. He passed his hand along her arms, and gently over her body. She had the figure of a thin but graceful child of fourteen, except that her feet and ankles were more beautiful.

“I see no change in you,” he assured her, “during all these years. Illness seems to have kept you young. Do you know that you are still very beautiful, AngÈle?”

Again the faint flush, the gleam of softening happiness in her face.

“You mustn’t turn my head, please,” she begged.

“Then I must leave off talking,” he replied, “for you are fast turning mine. Shall I read to you?”

“De Musset, please. The little volume of later poems. I kept them for you.”

He read for half an hour, sympathetically and well. When he laid down the volume her eyes thanked him.

“You are missing Ascot,” she remarked, as he made preparations for departure.

He nodded. “Between ourselves,” he confided, “I owe my bookmaker just a little beyond the limit of the amount with which I care to allow him to credit me. I haven’t a horse running, as you know, or in training. It seems to me I shall have to get through the summer on golf and tennis. I am going to try and keep the hounds, although of course it will be the last season.”

“Poor dear!” she murmured. “And poor idiot too! You know I have money, Bertram—a great deal more than I need. I don’t spend half of it, and Ralph says there is more to come to me. Why mayn’t I help?”

He bent down and kissed her tenderly.

“My dear,” he said, “if ever the day comes when I can call myself your husband, I may accept your bounty. Until then—well, we won’t talk of such matters.”

A delicate little wrinkle of dissatisfaction furrowed her brows. She shook her head at him.

“You are terribly obstinate,” she sighed. “You will come on Thursday?”

“Without fail,” he promised.

The dogs rose up from all sides as he passed out. He lingered for a moment to talk to the rather sulky but not unpleasant-looking girl, who was cutting some roses in the strip of front garden.

“Madame looks well,” he observed. “I hope that you are still content with the neighbourhood, Miss Besant?”

“I like it very much,” she assured him.

“If the doctor decides to permit Madame’s visit to the Hall next week,” he added, “we shall have, I hope, the pleasure of seeing you there.”

She thanked him a little stiffly. Sir Bertram whistled to his dogs, gazed for a moment at the high red brick wall opposite, which encircled the domain of the Great House, and, with a little bow of farewell, turned towards the village.