"Three dear old crocks. Admirable as pensioners, not to carry eleven stone to hounds. No, mother, I'm afraid there's nothing in your stables that will be good for more than a cover-hack." Mrs. Wornock sighed faintly in the midst of her bliss. She had a womanly horror of hunting and all its perils, and in her heart of hearts was always on the side of the fox; but she knew that without hunting and shooting Discombe Manor would very soon pall upon her son, dilettante and Jack-of-all-trades though he was. Music alone--passionately as he loved it--would not keep him contented. Allan and Suzette strolled home under the bright blue sky. These late days in October were the Indian summer of the year, a season in which it was a joy to live, especially in a land where the smoke from domestic hearths curling upward here and there in silvery wreaths from wood fires, only suggested homeliness and warmth, not filth and fog. They sauntered slowly homeward through the rustic lanes, and their talk was naturally of the new arrival. "Is he the kind of young man you expected him to be?" asked Suzette. There was no occasion to be more specific in one's mention of _him_. There could but be one young man in their thoughts to-day. "I don't know that I had formed any expectations about him." "Oh, Allan, that can't be true! You must have thought about him, after everybody telling you of the likeness. Remember what you told me in our very first dance--how dreadfully bored you had been about him, and how glad you were that I didn't know him." "My being bored--and I was horribly--was no reason why my imagination should dwell upon him. If I thought of him at all, I thought of him just as he is--the image of his portrait by Millais--and a very good-looking and well set-up young man--so much better looking than my humble self, that I wonder at any one's seeing a likeness between the two faces." "Is he better looking, Allan? I know I like your face best." "I'm glad of that, since you will have to put up with my face for a lifelong companion." "Allan, how grumpily you said that." "Did I, Suzie? I'm afraid I'm a brute. I am beginning to find out disagreeable depths in my character." She looked at him with a puzzled air--so sweetly innocent, so free from any backward-reaching thought--that made him happy again. He took up the little hand hanging loose at her side and kissed it. "Let us drop in upon Aunt Mornington, and ask her for lunch," he said as they came within sight of the Grove. "I don't feel like parting with you just yet, Suzie." "Quite impossible. I must be at home for father's tiffin." "I forgot that sacred institution. Well, Suzie, do you think it's possible the General might ask me to share that important meal if he saw me hanging about? We could go to the links afterwards, so that you might have the pleasure of seeing how wildly I can beat the air?"