a bride, she had gone to London for the season; it was always spring when she returned, even if the snow was lying on the ground. Ethel Venniker, as the dispenser of her mother’s charities, had acquired, perhaps, a graver view of life than would be thought wholly natural to her years. Or rather her character (at least, in the eyes of Gerald Eversley) was such a union of lightheartedness and seriousness, of merry frolicsome humour playing upon a surface of deep reverential gravity, as is, in a sense, the perfection of a true womanly nature. She did not shrink from talking, though she was unwilling to talk often, of the sad side of life. She was fond of music and dancing; the theatre, on the rare occasions when she went to it, was an inspiration to her; but she had known the spectacle of death. Her religious feeling was simple and profound. Above all, she had learnt from her mother that rank or wealth was itself a responsibility and, unless utilised to holy ends, a spiritual danger. ‘I used to think,’ was one of Lady Venniker’s favourite remarks, ‘that our Lord’s words about the difficulty of a rich man entering into the kingdom of Heaven were a hard saying, but as I have grown older and have seen more of the world, I have come to realise the truth of them.’ Among other topics, Gerald Eversley found that Miss Venniker did not altogether dissent from his estimate of sport. Here again her opinion was originally her mother’s. Sport was the one point of difference, though of perfectly amicable difference, between Lord Venniker and his wife. He, like all Englishmen of his rank, was a devotee of the great goddess Diana. Without hunting and shooting, life would have appeared to him intolerable, if it had not been unintelligible. Gerald Eversley, as this story has shown, was no sportsman. It is probable that, like a good many people who have not in their youth enjoyed the opportunity of becoming sportsmen, he did scant justice to the motives and sentiments of sport. In speaking of sport as cruel, he was apt to forget that the cruelty is just what the sportsmen are unaware of. They would like it as well, perhaps better, if the excitement could be obtained without any cost of animal suffering. And, after all, the opponents of sport are not above eating a grouse or a partridge. But one day, when Lord Venniker and Harry had gone out shooting, Gerald Eversley asked Miss Venniker, with whom he was walking, what she felt about sport. ‘I cannot say I quite like it,’ was her answer. He continued. ‘It always seems to me so strange that people should like killing and actually be proud of it. Your father, for instance, and Harry, who are so kind-hearted. People seem to be made heartless by sport. They lose their humanity--I mean, they lose it for the moment. I suppose it is a survival from the time when men lived in daily terror of wild beasts and paid honour to those who destroyed them.’