The ladies dismissed to tea and to whatever insipid joys the drawing-room might hold, the men addressed themselves with brisk resolution to the task of doing noble justice to the best cellar in the county. They were there, candidly and purposefully, to drink, and it was never too late to mend sobriety, but under Sir Harry’s roof the process had formality and the unbuttoned rusticity of native debauchery must be disciplined to the restraint of ordered toasts. A pedantic host, this young baronet, but his wines had quality, and they submitted with what patience they could summon to his idiosyncrasy. There were no laggards when Sir Harry bid them to his board. Ignoring the parson--which, mostly, was what parsons were for and certainly made no breach of etiquette--Sir Harry himself gave the toast of “The King” with a faintly challenging air habitual to him but démodé. Lancashire sentiment had veered since the forty-five and there was now no need, especially in Whitworth’s company, to emphasize a loyalty they all shared. It was not a fervent loyalty and no one was expected to be exuberant about the Hanoverians, but bygones were bygones, and one took the court one found as one took the climate. But did one? Did every one? Did, in especial, Reuben Hepplestall, whom Mr. Bantison watched so narrowly as he drank to the King? To Bantison the enigmatic was a provocation and a hope and as a specialist in enigmas he had his private notion that the whole of Hepplestall was not apparent on the surface: he nursed suspicion, precious because marketable if confirmed, that here was one who conserved the older loyalty, and he watched as he had watched before. Finger-glasses were on the table, but so crude a confession of faith as to pass his wine over the water was neither expected nor forthcoming and Hepplest all’s gesture, except that it repeated one which Bantison had noted mentally when “The King” had been toasted on other occasions, was so nearly imperceptible as to seem unlikely to have significance. But it was a repetition, and did the repetition imply a ritual? It was improbable. The risk was high, the gain non-existent, the defiance in such company too blunt, the whole idea of expressing, however subtly, a rebellion in a house of loyalists was unreasonable. Still, as Reuben raised his glass, it hovered for an instant in the air, it made, ever so slightly, a pause and (was it?) an obeisance which seemed directed to his, fob; and when Mr. Bantison sat down he frowned meditatively at the pools of mellow light reflected from the candles on the table and his face puckered into evil wrinkles till he looked like an obscene animal snarling to its spring; but that is only to say Mr. Bantison was thinking unusually hard.