And thus, in the pursuit of the infinitely little, the evening wore away. Songs and laughter, music of the lightest and most evanescent character, games which touched the confines of idiocy, and set Leonard wondering whether the evening amusements of Colney Hatch and Hanwell could possibly savour of wilder lunacy than these sports which his wife and her circle cultivated in the grave old reception-room, where a council of Cavaliers, with George Trevelyan of Nettlecombe, Royalist Colonel, at their head, had met and sworn fealty to Charles Stuart's cause, at hazard of fortune and life. Leonard stood with his back to the wide old fireplace, watching these revellers, and speculating, in a troubled spirit, as to how much of this juvenile friskiness was real; contemplating, with a cynical spirit, that nice sense of class distinction which enabled the two St. Aubyn girls to keep Mopsy and Dopsy at an impassable distance, even while engaged with them in these familiar sports. Vain that in the Post Office game, Dopsy as Montreal exchanged places with Emily St. Aubyn as Newmarket. Montreal and Newmarket themselves are not farther apart geographically than the two damsels were morally as they skipped into each other's chairs. Vain that in the Spelling game, the South Belgravians caught up the landowner's daughters with a surpassing sharpness and sometimes turned the laugh against those tender scions of the landed aristocracy. The very attitude of Clara St. Aubyn's chin--the way she talked apart with Mrs. Tregonell, seemingly unconscious of the Vandeleur presence, marked her inward sense of the gulf between them. It was midnight before any one thought of going to bed, yet there was unwonted animation at nine o'clock next morning in the dining-room, where every one was talking of the day's expedition: always excepting the master of the house, who sat at one end of the table, with Termagant, his favourite Irish setter, crouched at his feet, and his game-bag lying on a chair near at hand. "Are you really going to desert us?" asked Mopsy, with her sweetest smile. "I am not going to desert you, for I never had the faintest intention of joining you," answered Leonard bluntly; "whether my wife and her friends made idiots of themselves by playing nursery games in her drawing-room, or by skipping about a windy height on the edge of the sea, is their own affair. I can take my pleasure elsewhere." "Yes; but you take your pleasure very sadly, as somebody said of English people generally," urged Mopsy, whose only knowledge of polite literature was derived from the classical quotations and allusions in the _Daily Telegraph_; "you will be all alone, for Jack and little Monty have promised to come with us." "I gave them perfect freedom of choice. They may like that kind of thing. I don't."