Lucy drew her mother’s chair to the fire, and pulled off her own thick outdoor jacket. There was tea on the table ready to be poured out, and the soft lamplight and warm glow of the fire brought out all the prettiness of the room, with its gay tints and gleams of gold. What had trouble to do in that cheerful place, amid those artificial graces which had become natural and kindly by use and wont? The stir of her daughter’s movements brought Lady Curtis to herself. They sat down round the fire as if the new comer had been another son, and talked of Arthur. It was almost as endless, almost as engrossing a talk as when the mother and sister sat alone together, and felt as if they could never cease. But by and by Sir John came in for his cup of tea, and asked how it was the train was so late, and all the particulars of the journey. Sir John himself had delayed half an hour beyond his usual time in coming for his tea. He had felt Durant’s arrival too. CHAPTER X. The next day the ordinary guests began to arrive at Oakley. They were not of a very lively character. With an instinctive sense of the difference, which the family were scarcely conscious of, changes had been made in the list of visitors which would have been got together in Arthur’s time. Scarcely any young men were of the party. When there is not a young man in the house what use in asking young men? unless it had been in a matrimonial point of view for Lucy’s sake, an idea which not only Lucy but her mother regarded (in the latter case injudiciously, it ought to be said) with scorn. Sir John had given up hunting long ago, and if he made a serious shot once or twice in a season, it was more upon the principle which makes an old king open a ball than any more active personal liking for the sport. The party accordingly consisted in great part of his contemporaries, some in Parliament, some in the law, chiefly belonging to the learned professions. There was a judge, and there was the head of a college, and for a few days there was a bishop; but as this latter functionary was the most sportive member of the party, he could not be counted as adding to its solemnity; and these magnates of course did not stay long. And then there was the Master of the Hounds who was more solemn; and there were the wives of these gentlemen, and in some cases their daughters, and a stray man or two of the order of those who know everybody and have been everywhere, and have done a little of everything, without getting more than a general reputation for themselves, and without giving any very clear indications to the world where they sprang from or to whom they belonged. There were also a few ladies of the same species, but whose families and antecedents were unimpeachable. It was Lady Curtis who abhored dullness, who had added these. Sir John liked the dullness, and did not object to having a lady next to him who dined well and said little. In spite of Lady Curtis’s efforts, however, the party was dull.