“Thanks. Mumma wanted to know when your paying guest is coming and if you’d like to bring him up to play tennis one afternoon, and if so, when?” Thus, untroubled by subtleties of diplomacy, did Miss Kendal accomplish her mission. Nancy, with equal straightforwardness, selected a date about a week after Captain Patch’s expected arrival, and at once wrote the engagement down in a little book. “I am delighted with him, you know,” she said. “You’ll all like him--such a nice fellow.” “What sort of age is he?” asked Dolly Kendal, suddenly. “Twenty-six,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with precision. The Kendal twins, on their way home again, dispassionately remarked one to another that they thought Captain Patch would have been older. “It’s perfectly proper, of course, because of her old father.” “Good gracious, yes! Besides, what is Nancy Fazackerly? At least as old as Amy.” “That would make her thirty-three.” “She looks younger than that, doesn’t she? It’s funny to think of her having been married, and out in India and lost her husband, all inside five years, and come back again to this dead-alive place after all.” “Oh, well,” said Aileen, with the philosophy due to other people’s troubles, “I daresay she’ll manage to struggle along somehow, like the rest of us.” The Kendals, who seldom know cheerful anticipations, were more surprised than anybody when their own predictions as to the gain of an additional man to Cross Loman were realized. Captain Patch was a tall, copper-headed young man, who gazed with a certain beaming friendliness at everybody, out of very short-sighted brown eyes from behind a powerful pair of thick lenses. He had something of the happiness, and the engaging ugliness, of a young Clumber spaniel. As Mrs. Fazackerly had told us he would, he got on well with everybody. It was at the Dheera Dhoon tennis party that he was first introduced to the neighborhood. The Kendals were evidently rather glad of that, when they saw how very popular Mrs. Fazackerly’s paying guest seemed likely to become. “I think you met him at our house, didn’t you?” they said, firmly, when Sallie Ambrey, in her casual way, spoke as though she and Martyn had known the newcomer for years. After a time it became known that Captain Patch was writing a novel. “He writes, I believe,” people told one another with tremendous and mysterious emphasis, quite as though nobody in Cross Loman had ever got beyond pothooks and hangers. “Of course, he’ll put us all into his book,” said Mrs. Kendal, with her large, tolerant smile. “We expect that. Novelists are always on the look-out for what they call copy, we know.”