Mr. Piper went to his club oftener now-a-days than he had gone in the first Mrs. Piper’s time. Bella was making him a man of fashion, as he complained sometimes, with a fatuous delight in his young wife’s frivolities. She would drive him into Great Yafford in her pony carriage in the morning, do an hour’s shopping at Banbury’s, or get a new novel at the circulating library, and fetch him in the afternoon in her barouche, after making two or three calls on the commercial aristocracy; for what is the use of having fine clothes, if you cannot show them to somebody, or a carriage and pair if you cannot keep it standing before somebody’s door? Bella heartily despised the Porkmans, Timperleys, Wigzells, and all their set; but she was by nature an actress, and must have a stage and an audience of some kind. Thus it happened that Mr. Piper was at his club, and that Bella received Captain Standish alone. It was a lovely afternoon, the lawn was steeped in sunshine, the flower-beds were almost too dazzling to be looked at, the roses were in their midsummer glory. Bella received her visitor in the garden. She was fond of sitting out of doors. She liked to see the width and grandeur of her domain, the fallow deer grouped gracefully in the distance, the cool shadows of beech and oak, the tall elms yonder where the rooks had built for the last century. Perhaps she knew that she looked her prettiest in the garden, sitting in a low basket chair, in the shade of spreading lime branches. It was just the afternoon for archery. There was not a breath of wind to blow the arrows about. The noble old beeches shaded the long stretch of sward where the targets had been set up, and made it possible for an enthusiastic toxophilite to endure the midsummer heat. Bella made quite light of it. ‘I adore the summer,’ she said, when Captain Standish expressed his fear that she might find archery too great an exertion, with the thermometer at seventy-five in the shade. ‘I think I must belong to the cat family, I so enjoy basking in the sun.’ ‘So do I,’ said the captain, who looked as fresh and cool as if he had just come out of a water-cure establishment; ‘and I detest the people who go about the world mopping themselves and grumbling at the heat on every decent summer day.’ Bella blushed. Mr. Piper had an unpleasant way of mopping his face with a brown and yellow bandanna on warm afternoons. She felt that there must be many habits of his that would jar on Captain Standish’s nerves, if ever they came to be intimate.