This Coutts Hadleigh was a tall, wiry man, who entered into the pleasures of the world with discretion, and a cynical smile always on his face, as if he were laughing at the pleasures rather than in them. He was a captain of Volunteers, and as punctual in his attendance upon drill as in attendance at his office. For he was a strict man of business, and was now the practical manager as well as leading partner in the house of Hadleigh and Co., shipbrokers and bankers. He neither laughed at his brother Philip’s indifference to the affairs of the office, nor attempted to advise him. Sometimes, however, he would say, with one of his dry, cynical smiles: ‘You are doing everything you can, Phil, to keep yourself out of a partnership, and you will be sorry for it some day—especially if you mean to marry that young lady over the way in a hurry. Playing the gentleman at ease is not the way to make sure of the ease. However’—— Then he would shrug his shoulders, as if washing his hands of the whole matter with the mental exclamation: ‘But just as you like; there will be the more for me.’ Only he never uttered that exclamation aloud. ‘All right,’ Philip would say with a laugh; ‘my time is coming; and I prefer happiness to a banking account.’ There the subject would drop, and Coutts would turn away with a pitying smile. As for the three daughters, they accepted their position with as much content as is permitted to young ladies who have nothing whatever to do but go through the routine of paying formal visits in their carriage, attending garden parties in summer and dining out in winter. Miss Hadleigh (Beatrice) had been lately engaged to a thriving young merchant, and in consequence assumed a dignified primness. The other two, Caroline and Bertha, were looking forward to that happy state; and, meanwhile, having just been released from boarding-school, found their chief delights in fiction and lawn-tennis. They had every opportunity to enjoy themselves in their own ways, for their father interfered little with them, whilst he never stinted them in pocket-money. Ringsford Manor was a large old-fashioned building of red brick, with a wing added by Mr Hadleigh, when he came into possession, for a new dining-room and a billiard-room. The house stood in about twenty acres of ground, on the borders of the Forest. The gardens were under the care of a Scotchman, named Sam Culver, whose pride it was to produce the finest pansies, roses, and geraniums in the neighbourhood or at the local flower-shows. He had also obtained a prize at the Crystal Palace rose-show, which made him more eager than ever to maintain his reputation. The result of this honourable ambition was that the grounds of Ringsford were the admiration of the whole county; and as the proprietor on certain days of the year threw them open to the public and invited bands of school-children to an annual fête, his character as a benefactor spread far and wide.