“Oh, yes, that’s all right,” he said. “And Vincenzo was there. He was lying on Mr. Douglas’s sofa, looking--looking like nothing at all. Looking awfully queer. But Mr. Douglas said he would be all right soon.” “I expect he knows,” said Colin. “Vincenzo’s devoted to Mr. Douglas.... Dennis, I’ve been catching it hot since you left me. Your mother’s been scolding me. Whose side do you take? Hers or mine?” Dennis looked from one to the other. But he moved towards Violet. “I don’t know,” he said. “But aren’t we going to have a game of billiards?” * * * * * The Dowager’s wing at Stanier, of which Colin had made so summary a clearance twelve years before, had never become repopulated again. Aunt Hester was still alive, very much alive, indeed, but never, since the morning when she had ‘interfered’ about Pamela, had she set foot in Stanier. “Colin behaved like a devil to me, my dear,” she had said to Violet of that occasion. “He meant to turn me out and made that his excuse. Well, you don’t catch me going where I’m not wanted. I hope I’ve got too much spirit for that.” Violet, however, often took Dennis to see her when they were in town, and he had lunched with her and been handsomely tipped by her to-day on his way from Eton. Aunt Hester adored Dennis; she saw in him the Colin she had loved, and Dennis, for his part, thought her one of the most enterprizing old ladies he had ever come across. Why she did not come to see them at Stanier, he did not know, and she was remarkably brisk at changing the subject when it came up, but he meant to ask his father about it. Of the others, Ronald Stanier and his wife, though deprived of their permanent domicile, had been occasional guests here, till when, a year or two ago, on one of their visits, he had had a stroke one night, as he sat over his wine after dinner, quite in the traditional Stanier style, and had gone down with the decanter flying. His widow, strongly reacting, had gone to live at Winchester where she drove out daily in a brougham, gave small sad little dinner-parties, from which everyone went away at half-past ten, and was similarly entertained by her elderly guests. Once or twice a year she came to Stanier for a few nights, and played patience, and put some flowers on her husband’s grave, but she had no real existence. Stanier, as it had so often done to those who married into the house, had frozen her or perhaps rather burned up all such inflammable material as she had once possessed, and she lay now, so to speak, in the fender, clinking a little from time to time as she cooled, and disintegrating into ash....