He was a man of about seven-and-twenty, tall, broad-shouldered, good-looking, with something of a gladiatorial air in his billiard-room undress. He was fair, with a healthy Saxon colour, and Saxon blue eyes; features not chiselled, but somewhat heavily moulded, yet straight and regular withal; hair, a lightish brown, cropped closely to a well-shaped head; forehead, fairly furnished with intellectual organs, but not the brow of poet or philosopher, wit or savant: a good average English forehead, a good average English face, beaming with good-nature, as he stands by Madoline’s side, chalking his cue as industriously as if chalk could win the game. This was Edgar Turchill, of Hawksyard Grange, Sir Vernon Lawford’s most influential and pleasantest neighbour, a country squire of old family and fair fortune, owner of one of the most interesting places in the county, a real Warwickshire manor-house, and the only son of his widowed mother. The lady by the fire-place now began to think she had been neglected long enough, and beckoned Daphne with her fan. She beckoned the girl with an authoritative air which distinctly indicated relationship. ‘Come here and sit by me, child,’ she whispered, tapping the fender-stool with the point of her embroidered shoe, whereupon Daphne meekly crouched at the lady’s feet, prepared for the worst. ‘Why have you never been to the Rectory?’ Daphne twisted her fingers in and out of her slender watch-chain with an embarrassed air. ‘Indeed, I hardly know why, Aunt Rhoda,’ she faltered; ‘perhaps it was because I was enjoying myself so much. Everything at home was so new to me, you see—the gardens, the river, the meadows.’ ‘You were enjoying yourself so much that you had no inclination to see your aunt and uncle?’ ‘Uncle?’ echoed Daphne. ‘Oh, you mean the Rector?’ ‘Of course. Is he not your uncle?’ ‘Is he, aunt? I know he’s your husband; but as you only married him a year ago, and he hadn’t begun to be my uncle when I was last at home, it never occurred to me——’ ‘That by my marriage with him he had become your uncle. That looks like ignorance, Daphne, or want of proper feeling,’ said the Rector’s wife with an offended air. ‘It was ignorance, Aunt Rhoda. At Madame Tolmache’s they taught us so much geography and geology and astronomy, don’t you know, that they were obliged to keep us in the dark about uncles and aunts. And am I really to call the Rector, uncle? It seems quite awful.’ ‘Why awful?’