"It wasn't only me and the servants: papa was there and Aunt Maria, and there were several people staying in the house." "By the way, Ponty has delivered herself of a simply priceless judgment to-day," I said, and proceeded to retail to my sister the story of the man whose house was struck by lightning because he left it too much to servants. Annabel laughed heartily. Then, after a moment's pause, she said: "But all the same, Reggie, I don't quite see what difference his being at home would have made." I stood still in the garden path, and regarded my sister with profound admiration not unmixed with wonder. "Annabel," I exclaimed, "in your own particular way you are almost as priceless as Ponty!" CHAPTER III FRANK One afternoon a few days after the foregoing conversations, when Annabel and I were seated round (as far as it is in the power of two persons to sit round anything) the old gate-legged table in the hall at the Manor, having our respective teas, the door-bell clanged, and the butler in due sequence ushered into our midst Arthur Blathwayte and another--which other was destined to play an important part in the dawning drama of my life. I will try to describe him, though to my mind the Wildacres always beggared description: they were so utterly unlike everybody else that there were no known standards by which to measure them. On that April afternoon when he first crossed my path, Frank Wildacre was eighteen, and looked both more and less. He was by no means tall, but so slenderly built that he seemed taller than he really was until one compared him with other men, and this smallness and slightness added to the boyishness of his appearance. His face was neither old nor young--or, rather, it was both. It possessed somehow the youthfulness of dawn and of springtime, and of all those things which have retained their undimmed youth through the march of the centuries. It was not so much that Frank Wildacre was young; everybody has been young at some time or another, and has got over it sooner or later: it was rather that he was youth itself. I could not tell when first I saw him whether his face was beautiful or not: I cannot tell now; I only knew that it was wonderful, strange, glorious, unlike any other face in the world--save one: and that one I had not yet seen. I perceived that his hair was dark and curly, and that his eyes were of that deep and mysterious grey which sometimes looks blue and sometimes black: also that he had that pale delicacy of skin and complexion which makes other people appear coarse and clumsy by contrast. Thus far even my short-sighted eyes could carry me. But it was not by their aid that I became conscious of that strange and subtle gift, possessed to such an extreme degree by Wildacre and his children, which for want of a better name men call charm. It was elusive, it was bewitching, it was indescribable; but all the same it was _there_.