"Who you goin' to get?" asked Charlie. "Well, there's _you_," spreading out her fingers in what had been for half a lifetime a pretty affectation of hers, and ticking them off. "And there's old Mother D. of Drayton, and I shall try to get the Duke." "Oh, your perpetual Peabody Yid," began Charlie. "Don't," said his cousin, laughing with great charm. "Well, yes, the Duke, and I've got _him_ already," she said pointing to the General. "And ... and I must have William." Vic Mosel and Mr. Higginson shouted together: "Risking William! Oh! I say!" while Charlie's eye gleamed at the mention of her brother's name and he gloated on the prospect of a really good shindy. "Oh, fiddlesticks-ends," said Mary Smith. "He's a white man: besides some one must do host for me. _You're_ too green" (she said that to Fitzgerald), "and he'll behave all right. I'll warn him." "Then," she went on hurriedly, "then there's Mrs. Carey and her mother, and the Steynings--I can't remember the whole lot. Perkins would tell you. There's sixteen, I know that." "I'll hold the sponge for William Bailey," said Charlie solemnly; "the General supports the Duke." "If there's any row," said Mary Smith to him vigorously, "I shall know who started it, and who will lose by it. William's a dear." And so the flashing talk went round, while, with Mr. Clutterbuck in the Caterham glens, the hours crept on towards an appointed day; and the horses were exercised and the motors ran, and the lake slowly filled, and parties, a little larger with each succeeding week, groups of their old friends and of their new, met and drank champagne at lunch, at dinner, and at supper too, until June was ended. The second of July was warm and fine: an open motor would have pleased Mr. Clutterbuck for the run to town,--but Mrs. Clutterbuck, Mrs. Clutterbuck knew! It was in the Limousine that they swept up the London Road, past the Palace and round into St. James's Place. Mr. Clutterbuck, who had long secretly wondered how those great houses upon the Park were approached at all, and who had half believed that some royal entry, hidden from the vulgar gaze, led into them, saw this great mystery solved: he was silent upon his discovery. He wondered whether one should tell the motor to go into the stables of the house, or what: and again Mrs. Clutterbuck knew. She left it for the motor man and the big flunkeys to thresh out between them. When they were at table the many lights, the much wine and the more talk entered her husband's soul and warmed it. The lights greatly pleased him; the wine he drank freely. He was beginning to live.