The mistress of Thorpe stooped to pat a black Pomeranian which had rushed out to meet her. It was when she indulged in some such movement that one realized more thoroughly the wonderful grace of her slim, supple figure. She who hated all manner of exercise had the ease of carriage and flexibility of one whose life had been spent in athletic pursuits.

“How are you all?” she remarked languidly. “Shocking hostess, am I not?”

A fair-haired little woman turned away from the tea-table. She held a chocolate Éclair in one hand, and a cup of Russian tea in the other. Her eyes were very dark, and her hair very yellow—and both were perfectly and unexpectedly natural. Her real name was Lady Margaret Penshore, but she was known to her intimates, and to the mysterious individuals who write under a nom-de-guerre in the society papers, as “Lady Peggy.”

“A little casual perhaps, my dear Wilhelmina,” she remarked. “Comes from your association with Royalty, I suppose. Try one of your own caviare sandwiches, if you want anything to eat. They’re ripping.”

Wilhelmina—she was one of the few women of her set with whose Christian name no one had ever attempted to take any liberties—approached the tea-table and studied its burden. There were a dozen different sorts of sandwiches arranged in the most tempting form, hot-water dishes with delicately browned tea-cakes simmering gently, thick cream in silver jugs, tea and coffee, and in the background old China dishes piled with freshly gathered strawberries and peaches and grapes, on which the bloom still rested. On a smaller table were flasks of liqueurs and a spirit decanter.

“Anyhow,” she remarked, pouring herself out some tea, “I do feed you people well. And as to being casual, I warned you that I never put in an appearance before five.”

A man in the background, long and lantern-faced, a man whose age it would have been as impossible to guess as his character, opened and closed his watch with a clink.

“Twenty minutes past,” he remarked. “To be exact, twenty-two minutes past.”

His hostess turned and regarded him contemplatively.

“How painfully precise!” she remarked. “Somehow, it doesn’t sound convincing, though. Your watch is probably like your morals.”

“What a flattering simile!” he murmured.

“Flattering?”

“It presupposes, at any rate, their existence,” he explained. “It is years since I was reminded of them.”

Wilhelmina seated herself before an open card-table.

“No doubt,” she answered. “You see I knew you when you were a boy. Seriously,” she continued, “I have been engaged with my agent for the last half-hour—a most interesting person, I can assure you. There was an agreement with one Philip Crooks concerning a farm, which he felt compelled to read to me—every word of it! Come along and cut, all of you!”

The fourth person, slim, fair-haired, the typical army officer and country house habituÉ, came over to the table, followed by the lantern-jawed man. Lady Peggy also turned up a card.

“You and I, Gilbert,” Wilhelmina remarked to the elder man. “Here’s luck to us! What on earth is that you are drinking?”

“Absinthe,” he answered calmly. “I have been trying to persuade Austin to join me, but it seems they don’t drink absinthe in the Army.”

“I should think not, indeed,” his hostess answered. “And you my partner, too! Put the stuff away.”

Gilbert Deyes raised his glass and looked thoughtfully into its opalescent depths.

“Ah! my dear lady,” he said, “you make a great mistake when you number absinthe amongst the ordinary intoxicating beverages. I tell you that the man who invented it was an epicure in sensations and—er—gastronomy. If only De Quincey had realized the possibility of absinthe, he would have given us jewelled prose indeed.”

Wilhelmina yawned.

“Bother De Quincey!” she declared. “It’s your bridge I’m thinking of.”

“Dear lady, you need have no anxiety,” Deyes answered reassuringly. “One does not trifle with one’s livelihood. You will find me capable of the most daring finesses, the most wonderful coups. I shall not revoke, I shall not lead out of the wrong hand. My declarations will be touched with genius. The rubber, in fact, is already won. Vive l’absinthe!”

“The rubber will never be begun if you go on talking nonsense much longer,” Lady Peggy declared, tapping the table impatiently. “I believe I hear the motors outside. We shall have the whole crowd here directly.”

“They won’t find their way here,” their hostess assured them calmly. “My deal, I believe.”

They played the hand in silence. At its conclusion, Wilhelmina leaned back in her chair and listened.

“You were right, Peggy,” she said, “they are all in the hall. I can hear your brother’s voice.”

Lady Peggy nodded.

“Sounds healthy, doesn’t it?”

Gilbert Deyes leaned across to the side table and helped himself to a cigarette.

“Healthy! I call it boisterous,” he declared. “Where have they all been?”

“Motoring somewhere,” Wilhelmina answered. “They none of them have any idea how to pass the time away until the first run.”

“Sport, my dear hostess,” Deyes remarked, “is the one thing which makes life in a country house almost unendurable.”

Wilhelmina shrugged her shoulders.

“That’s all very well, Gilbert,” she said, “but what should we do if we couldn’t get rid of some of these lunatics for at least part of the day?”

“Reasonable, I admit,” Deyes answered, “but think what an intolerable nuisance they make of themselves for the other part. I double No Trumps, Lady Peggy.”

Lady Peggy laid down her cards.

“For goodness’ sake, no more digressions,” she implored. “Remember, please, that I play this game for the peace of mind of my tradespeople! I redouble!”

The hand was played almost in silence. Lady Peggy lost the odd trick and began to add up the score with a gentle sigh.

“After all,” her partner remarked, returning to the subject which they had been discussing, “I don’t think that we could get on very well in this country without sport, of some sort.”

“Of course not,” Deyes answered. “We are all sportsmen, every one of us. We were born so. Only, while some of us are content to wreak our instinct for destruction upon birds and animals, others choose the nobler game—our fellow-creatures! To hunt or trap a human being is finer sport than to shoot a rocketing pheasant, or to come in from hunting with mud all over our clothes, smelling of ploughed fields, steaming in front of the fire, telling lies about our exploits—all undertaken in pursuit of a miserable little animal, which as often as not outwits us, and which, in an ordinary way, we wouldn’t touch with gloves on! What do you say, Lady Peggy?”

“You’re getting beyond me,” she declared. “It sounds a little savage.”

Deyes dealt the cards slowly, talking all the while.

“Sport is savage,” he declared. “No one can deny it. Whether the quarry be human or animal, the end is death. But of all its varieties, give me the hunting of man by man, the brain of the hunter coping with the wiles of the hunted, both human, both of the same order. The game’s even then, for at any moment they may change places—the hunter and his quarry. It’s finer work than slaughtering birds at the coverside. It gives your sex a chance, Lady Peggy.”

“It sounds exciting,” she admitted.

“It is,” he answered.

His hostess looked up at him languidly.

“You speak like one who knows!”

“Why not?” he murmured. “I have been both quarry and hunter. Most of us have more or less! I declare Hearts!”

Again there was an interval of silence, broken only by the stock phrases of the game, and the soft patter of the cards upon the table. Once more the hand was played out and the cards gathered up. Captain Austin delivered his quota to the general discussion.

“After all,” he said, “if it wasn’t for sport, our country houses would be useless.”

“Not at all!” Deyes declared. “Country houses should exist for——”

“For what, Mr. Deyes? Do tell us,” Lady Peggy implored.

“For bridge!” he declared. “For giving weary married people the opportunity for divorce, and as an asylum from one’s creditors.”

Wilhelmina shook her head as she gathered up her cards.

“You are not at your best to-day, Gilbert,” she said. “The allusion to creditors is prehistoric! No one has them nowadays. Society is such a hop-scotch affair that our coffers are never empty.”

“What a Utopian sentiment!” Lady Peggy murmured.

“We can’t agree, can we?” Deyes whispered in her ear.

“You! Why they say that you are worth a million,” she protested.

“If I am I remain poor, for I cannot spend it,” he declared.

“Why not?” his hostess asked him from across the table.

“Because,” he answered, “I am cursed with a single vice, trailing its way through a labyrinth of virtues. I am a miser!”

Lady Peggy laughed incredulously.

“Rubbish!” she exclaimed.

“Dear lady, it is nothing of the sort,” he answered, shaking his head sadly. “I have felt it growing upon me for years. Besides, it is hereditary. My mother opened a post-office savings bank account for me. At an early age I engineered a corner in marbles and sold out at a huge profit. I am like the starving dyspeptic at the rich man’s feast.”

Captain Austin intervened.

“I declare Diamonds,” he announced, and the hand proceeded.

Wilhelmina leaned back in her chair as the last trick fell. Her eyes were turned towards the window. She could just see the avenue of elms down which her agent had ridden a short while since. Deyes, through half closed eyes, watched her with some curiosity.

“If one dared offer a trifling coin of the realm——” he murmured.

“I was thinking of your theory,” she interrupted. “According to you, I suppose the whole world is made up of hunters and their quarry. Can you tell, I wonder, by looking at people, to which order they belong?”

“It is easy,” he answered. “Yet you must remember we are continually changing places. The man who cracks the whip to-day is the hunted beast to-morrow. The woman who mocks at her lover this afternoon is often the slave-bearer when dusk falls. Swift changes like this are like rain upon the earth. They keep us, at any rate, out of the asylums.”

Wilhelmina was still looking out of the window. Up the great avenue, in and out amongst the tree trunks, but moving always with swift buoyant footsteps towards the house, came a slim, dark figure, soberly dressed in ill-fitting clothes. He walked with the swing of early manhood, his head was thrown back, and he carried his hat in his hand. She leaned forward to watch him more closely—he seemed to have associated himself in some mysterious manner with the mocking words of Gilbert Deyes. Half maliciously, she drew his attention to the swiftly approaching figure.

“Come, my friend of theories,” she said mockingly. “There is a stranger there, the young man who walks so swiftly. To which of your two orders does he belong?”

Deyes looked out of the window—a brief, careless glance.

“To neither,” he answered. “His time has not come yet. But he has the makings of both.”