The great Alfred came up. "You're all right," he said briefly to Lady Fanny and Arthur, and gave a reassuring nod to Lady Swarleigh herself. Then he looked at his watch, and from it, expectantly, towards the doors. On the instant they opened; dinner was ready. Alfred again nodded his head just perceptibly and put his watch back in his pocket. He turned to Lady Fanny. "You're at the pink table--on the far side." He smiled dreamily as he added, "In the draught, you know." "Bother! You always put me there!" "_Seniores priores_--and little girls last! Sorry for you, Mr. Lisle, but you see you're on duty--and I've got to sit there myself, moreover. And you'll have to talk to me, because I haven't got a woman. I'm taking in the Chief Constable--jolly, isn't it?" However, at the pink table--where the host presided, flanked by the High Sheriff's wife and the Bishop's wife--the young folks in the draught got on very well, in spite of it; and all their wants were most sedulously supplied. "The thing in this house is to sit near Alfred," Lady Fanny observed. "Papa and mamma may get nothing, but you're all right by Alfred!" "That's a good 'un!" chuckled the Chief Constable, a stout old bachelor Major of ruddy aspect. "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn," said Alfred, who appeared to be fond of proverbial expressions. "You see, he engages and dismisses all the men," Lady Fanny explained. It struck Arthur that Lady Fanny and Alfred were in truth remarkably good friends, and he was not wrong. In the future among his own best friends he counted Mr. and Lady Fanny Daynton, and Mr. Daynton turned his remarkable powers of organisation to the service of the public. But to-night Lady Fanny dutifully devoted herself to the Marshal, and proved an intelligent as well as a gay companion. Seeing his interest in his surroundings, she told him about the pictures on the walls, the old silver ornaments on the table, the armorial devices on the silver plates. "You see, papa has drummed all the family history into us," she said, in laughing apology for her little display of learning. "He says people don't deserve to have old things if they don't take an interest in them." "I'm afraid I should take only too much, if they were mine. They appeal to me awfully." He added, smiling in a burst of candour, with a little wave of his hands: "So does all this!" She considered what he said for a moment with a pretty gravity, evidently understanding his words and gesture to refer to the surroundings at large, the pomp and circumstance in which it was her lot to live, to which he came as a stranger and on which he looked with unaccustomed eyes; she liked his frank admission that it was unfamiliar. "I don't think it hurts," she said at last, "if you don't take credit to yourself for it. You know what I mean? If you don't think it makes you yourself different from other people." "But is that easy?" he asked in curiosity. "Isn't there a subtle influence?"