'By Jove, I'll go--and you, Jerry,' he exclaimed. 'Of course.' Each dashed off an acceptance, and they were despatched to Pall Mall in the care of Trevor's valet. After a time, as if repenting of his sudden facility, Trevor Chute muttered: 'He used barely to bow to me in the Row or in the streets after he gave me my _congé_. What the deuce can his object be? Is he--is he relenting?' The pulsation of Chute's heart quickened at the idea, and the colour deepened in his bronzed cheek. 'How anomalous and singular is the position in which we both stand with this selfish old fellow and his daughters,' said he to Jerry as they ascended the stately marble staircase of the baronet's club next evening, and gave their cards to a giant in livery, with the small head and enormous calves and feet peculiar to the fraternity of the shoulder-knot. As they were ushered into a lofty and magnificent room, the great windows of which opened to Pall Mall, Sir Carnaby took their cards mechanically from the silver salver, but seemed chiefly intent on bowing out a tall and fashionable-looking man, whose leading characteristics were languor of gait and bearing, with insipid blue eyes, and a bushy, sandy-coloured moustache. 'And you won't dine with us, Desmond?' he was saying. 'Impossible, thanks very much,' drawled the other. 'Then I have your full permission, Sir Carnaby?' 'With all my warmest wishes, my dear fellow,' responded the baronet cordially; and, hat in hand, the visitor bowed himself out, with a brief kind of stare at Trevor Chute, whose face, he thought, he somehow remembered, and a dry shake of the hand with Jerry Vane, whom he knew. He was gone, 'with full permission,' to do what? Chute's heart foreboded at that moment all the two words meant, and the next he found himself cordially greeted by the man whose son-in-law he had once so nearly been. 'Ha, Captain Chute, welcome back from India,' he exclaimed. 'By Jove, how brown you look--brown as a berry, Violet said--after potting tigers, and all that sort of thing; too much for Beverley, though. Poor Jack--good fellow, Beverley, but rash, I fear. Very glad to thank you in person for all your kindness to him and to poor Ida. Most kind of you both, I am sure, to come on so hurried an invitation.' Of Beverley and Ida, with reference to the death of the first, and the grief of the second, he spoke in the same jaunty and smiling way that he did of the beauty of the weather, the brilliance of the London season, the topics before the House last night, or anything else, and laughingly he led the way to dinner, the courses of which were perfect, and included all manner of far-fetched luxuries, even to pigeons stewed in champagne, and other culinary absurdities. Sir Carnaby did not seem one day older than when Trevor Chute had seen him last, and yet he had attained to those years when most men age rapidly.