His answer was unheard by Aminta. She gathered from Mrs. Lawrence's pleased sparkle that he had been invited to stand in the list; and the strange, the absurd spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking the heroic attitude for attack and defence wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly vivid first-of-May cricketing field, a scene of snowballs flying, the vision of a strenuous lighted figure scaling to noble young manhood. Isabella Lawrence's look at him spirited the bright past out of the wretched long-brown-coat shroud of the present, prompting her to grieve that some woman's hand had not smoothed a small tuft of hair, disorderly on his head a little above the left parting, because Isabella Lawrence Finchley could have no recollection of how it used to toss feathery--wild at his games. My lord hummed again. 'I suspect we 're going to get a drubbing. This fellow here has had his French maitre d'armes. Show me your hand, sir.' Weyburn smiled, and extended his right hand, saying: 'The wrist wants exercise.' 'Ha! square thumb, flesh full at the nails' ends; you were a bowler at cricket.' 'Now examine the palms, my lord; I judge by the lines on the palms,' Mrs. Pagnell remarked. He nodded to her and rose. Coffee had not been served, she reminded him; it was coming in, so down he sat a yard from the table; outwardly equable, inwardly cursing coffee; though he refused to finish a meal without his cup. 'I think the palms do betray something,' said Mrs. Lawrence; and Aminta said: 'Everything betrays.' 'No, my dear,' Mrs. Pagnell corrected her; 'the extremities betray, and we cannot read the centre. Is it not so, my lord?' 'It may be as you say, ma'am.' She was disappointed in her scheme to induce a general examination of palms, and especially his sphinx lordship's. Weyburn controlled the tongue she so frequently tickled to an elvish gavotte, but the humour on his face touched Mrs. Lawrence's to a subdued good-fellow roguishness, and he felt himself invited to chat with her on the walk for a reposeful ten minutes in Aminta's drawing-room. Mrs. Pagnell, 'quite enjoying the company,' as she told her niece, was dismayed to hear her niece tell her of a milliner's appointment, positive for three o'clock; and she had written it in her head 'p.m., four o'clock,' and she had mislaid or destroyed the milliner's note; and she still had designs upon his lordship's palms, things to read and hint around her off the lines. She departed. Lord Ormont became genial; and there was no one present who did not marvel that he should continue to decree a state of circumstances more or less necessitating the infliction he groaned under. He was too lofty to be questioned, even by his favourites. Mrs. Lawrence conjured the ghost of Lady Charlotte for an answer: this being Lord Adderwood's idea. Weyburn let his thoughts go on fermenting. Pride froze a beginning stir in the bosom of Aminta.