It was the first day of the Christmas holidays, and a fine hunting morning, with clouds that showed no immediate threat of rain, and a soft air that contained an illusive promise of spring. Young George, looking out of his bedroom window, found life very good. Previous Christmas holidays had held as their culmination visits to country houses in which he might, if he were lucky, get two or three days' hunting; but hunting was to be the staple amusement of these holidays, with a young horse all his own upon which his thoughts were set with an ardour almost lover-like. He was to shoot too, with the men. His first gun had been ordered from his father's gun-maker, and Barbara had told him that it had already come, and was lying snugly in its baize-lined case of new leather, with his initials stamped upon it, ready for the family present-giving on Christmas morning. Furthermore there would be a large and pleasant party at the Abbey for Christmas, and other parties to follow, with a ball in the week of New Year. Young George, under the maturing influence of Jimmy Beckley, had come to think that a grown-up ball might be rather good fun, especially in one's own house, and with country neighbours coming to it, most of whom one knew. There would be other festivities in other country houses, including a play at Feltham Hall, which Jimmy, who was a youth of infinite parts, had written himself during the foregoing term. Kate Pemberton, to whom his fancy had returned on the approach of the hunting season, was to be asked to play the heroine, with himself as the hero. There were also parts for the Grafton girls and for Young George, who had kindly been given permission to write his own up if he could think of anything he fancied himself saying. The play was frankly a melodrama, and turned upon the tracking down of a murderer through a series of strange and exciting adventures. Young George had first been cast for the professional detective--Jimmy, of course, playing the unprofessional one, who loves the heroine--but, as no writing up of the part had prevented it being apparent that the professional detective was essentially a fool, he had changed it for that of the villain. Young George rather fancied himself as the villain, who was compounded of striking attitudes, personal bravery and occasional biographical excursions revealing a career of desperate crime, to which he had added, with Jimmy's approval, a heart not altogether untouched by gentler emotions. Maggie Williams was to be his long-lost little sister, the thought of whom was to come over him when he was stirred to his blackest crimes, aided by a vision of her face through transparent gauze at the back of the stage; and she was to appear to him in person on his deathbed, and give him a chance of a really effective exit from a troubled and, on the whole, thoroughly ill-used world. It would be great fun, getting ready for it towards the