“Rather fun with half the neighbourhood looking on, and anyhow not worse than this Saturday-to-Tuesday business of dying by inches; and then I should go on into something else. If I had been a moderately good otter I suppose I should get back into human shape of some sort; probably something rather primitive—a little brown, unclothed Nubian boy, I should think.” “I wish you would be serious,” sighed Amanda; “you really ought to be if you’re only going to live till Tuesday.” As a matter of fact Laura died on Monday. “So dreadfully upsetting,” Amanda complained to her uncle-in-law, Sir Lulworth Quayne. “I’ve asked quite a lot of people down for golf and fishing, and the rhododendrons are just looking their best.” “Laura always was inconsiderate,” said Sir Lulworth; “she was born during Goodwood week, with an Ambassador staying in the house who hated babies.” “She had the maddest kind of ideas,” said Amanda; “do you know if there was any insanity in her family?” “Insanity? No, I never heard of any. Her father lives in West Kensington, but I believe he’s sane on all other subjects.” “She had an idea that she was going to be reincarnated as an otter,” said Amanda. “One meets with those ideas of reincarnation so frequently, even in the West,” said Sir Lulworth, “that one can hardly set them down as being mad. And Laura was such an unaccountable person in this life that I should not like to lay down definite rules as to what she might be doing in an after state.” “You think she really might have passed into some animal form?” asked Amanda. She was one of those who shape their opinions rather readily from the standpoint of those around them. Just then Egbert entered the breakfast-room, wearing an air of bereavement that Laura’s demise would have been insufficient, in itself, to account for. “Four of my speckled Sussex have been killed,” he exclaimed; “the very four that were to go to the show on Friday. One of them was dragged away and eaten right in the middle of that new carnation bed that I’ve been to such trouble and expense over. My best flower bed and my best fowls singled out for destruction; it almost seems as if the brute that did the deed had special knowledge how to be as devastating as possible in a short space of time.” “Was it a fox, do you think?” asked Amanda. “Sounds more like a polecat,” said Sir Lulworth. “No,” said Egbert, “there were marks of webbed feet all over the place, and we followed the tracks down to the stream at the bottom of the garden; evidently an otter.” Amanda looked quickly and furtively across at Sir Lulworth. Egbert was too agitated to eat any breakfast, and went out to superintend the strengthening of the poultry yard defences. “I think she might at least have waited till the funeral was over,” said Amanda in a scandalised voice. “It’s her own funeral, you know,” said Sir Lulworth; “it’s a nice point in etiquette how far one ought to show respect to one’s own mortal remains.”