‘To think of the waste going on in the servants’ hall, now, my dear!’ continued Miss Coyle, with the tone of a Hebrew prophet bewailing the follies of his misguided nation. ‘It was bad enough in the first Mrs. Piper’s time, though there never was a more careful housekeeper. I’ve heard her lament it many a day. WHAT must it be NOW?’ Miss Coyle opened her eyes very wide as she uttered this awful question, and poor little Mrs. Namby, who always agreed with everybody, but wished harm to nobody, opened hers in sympathy. ‘Ah!’ she sighed. ‘She’s very young, isn’t she? You can’t expect much carefulness from such a pretty young thing as that.’ ‘Pretty young thing, indeed,’ cried Miss Coyle, contemptuously. ‘We’ve all been pretty young things in our day.’ This was an assertion which, taken in conjunction with Miss Coyle’s present physiognomy, was rather difficult to believe. ‘But did that absolve us from doing our duty? Would that have excused us if we’d been given over to dress, and dissipation, and----’ here Miss Coyle made a long and solemn pause----‘FLIRTATION?’ ‘Oh,’ cried poor Mrs. Namby, almost jumping off her garden chair, ‘pray don’t say that. I hope Mrs. Piper has too much respect for herself as a young married woman to be guilty of flirtation.’ ‘I say nothing,’ replied Miss Coyle. ‘Look at that, and judge for yourself, Mrs. Namby.’ ‘That’ was as pretty a living picture of light-hearted youth as a painter of modern manners need have cared to paint. Against the green background of beech boughs, bright with their midsummer shoots, upon a carpet of velvet sward, stood two figures apart from the rest of the revellers--a man in gray, tall, well made, good-looking; a woman in an archery dress of Lincoln green, setting off a form slight and delicate enough for one of Diana’s nymphs, a hat and feather, _à la_ Rosalind, poised lightly on her burnished auburn hair, neat little hands in tan gauntlets, and a tall bow that became her as a fan becomes an Andalusian. The man in gray was Captain Standish, the crack captain in the crack regiment then stationed at Great Yafford. The regiment considered itself a great deal too good for Great Yafford, and the captain considered himself too good for the regiment. He was a man of good family; he had large means, a handsome face, and a fine figure; he had come off first in all athletic exercises at school and college; he had not learnt anything else in particular--or in his own words he had not ‘gone in for’ anything else; he left it to be inferred that he could have taken honours had he so chosen. The lady in Lincoln green was Mrs. Piper the second. She had instituted these archery meetings for her own pleasure as well as that of her friends, but she had not yet learned to hit the gold. The three tall Miss Porkmans had been beating her ignominiously in this afternoon’s contest. Captain Standish had taken her in hand, and was giving her a lesson in the management of her bow.