"I wonder if there is any ancient crime in the Tregonell family that makes the twenty-fifth of October a fatal date," Mopsy speculated, with a lachrymose air, on the afternoon which followed the Baron's hasty departure. "This very day last year Mr. Hamleigh shot himself, and spoiled all our pleasure; and to-day, the Baron de Cazalet rushes away as if the house was infected, Mrs. Tregonell keeps her own room with a nervous headache, and Mr. Tregonell is going to carry off Jack to be broiled alive in some sandy waste among prowling tigers, or to catch his death of cold upon more of those horrid mountains. One might just as well have no brother." "If he ever sent us anything from abroad we shouldn't feel his loss so keenly," said Dopsy, in a plaintive voice, "but he doesn't. If he were to traverse the whole of Africa we shouldn't be the richer by a single ostrich feather--and those undyed natural ostriches are such good style. South America teems with gold and jewels; Peru is a proverb; but what are _we_ the better off?" "It is rather bad form for the master of a house to start on his travels before his guests have cleared out," remarked Mopsy. "And an uncommonly broad hint for the guests to hasten the clearing-out process," retorted Dopsy. "I thought we were good here for another month--till Christmas perhaps. Christmas at an old Cornish manor-house would have been too lovely--like one of the shilling annuals." "A great deal nicer," said Mopsy, "for you never met with a country-house in a Christmas book that was not peopled with ghosts and all kind of ghastliness." Luncheon was lively enough, albeit de Cazalet was gone, and Mrs. Tregonell was absent, and Mr. Tregonell painfully silent. The chorus of the passionless, the people for whom life means only dressing and sleeping and four meals a day, found plenty to talk about. Jack Vandeleur was in high spirits. He rejoiced heartily at the turn which affairs had taken that morning, having from the first moment looked upon the projected meeting on Trebarwith sands as likely to be fatal to his friend, and full of peril for all concerned in the business.