On a terrace outside lighted windows a powerful young fellow, in a butterfly collar and a corded smoking jacket, was walking up and down with a tall girl not unlike him in the face; but their faces were only to be seen in glimpses as they passed the drawing-room windows, and at not less regular intervals when a red light in the sky, the source of which was concealed by the garden foliage, became positively brilliant. The air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and musk-roses and mown grass; midges fretted in and out of the open windows. But for the lurid lighting of the sky, with its Cyclopean suggestion of some mammoth forge, you were in the heart of England undefiled. “It’s no use our talking about Tony,” the tall girl said. “I think you’re frightfully down on him; we shall never agree.” “Not as long as you make a fool of the fellow,” said the blunt young man. “Tony’s no fool,” remarked Lettice Upton, irrelevantly enough. “You know what I mean,” snapped her brother Horace. “He’s being absolutely spoilt, and you’re at the bottom of it.” “I didn’t give him asthma!” “Don’t be childish, Letty.” “But that’s what’s spoiling his life.” “I wasn’t talking about his life. I don’t believe it, either.” “You think he enjoys his bad nights?” “I think he scores by them. He’d tell you himself that he never even thinks of getting up to first school now.” “Would you if you’d been sitting up half the night with asthma?” “Perhaps not; but I don’t believe that happens so often as you think.” “It happens often enough to justify him in making one good night pay for two or three bad ones.” “I don’t call that playing the game. I call it shamming.” “Well, if it is, he makes up for it. They were doing Ancient Greek Geography in his form at early school last term. Tony tackled it in his spare time, and got most marks in the exam.” “Beastly young swot!” quoth his elder brother. “I’m glad he didn’t buck to me about that.” “I don’t think there’s much danger of his bucking to you,” said Lettice, smiling in the red light. She did not add as her obvious reason that Horace, like many another athletic young man, was quite incapable of sympathising with the non-athletic type. But he guessed that she meant something of the sort, and having sensibilities of his own, and a good heart somewhere in his mesh of muscles, he felt hurt. “I looked after him all right,” said Horace, “the one term we were there together. So did Fred for the next year. But it’s rather rough on Fred and myself, who were both something in the school at his age, to hear and see for ourselves that Tony’s nobody even in the house!” Lettice slipped a sly hand under the great biceps of her eldest brother. “But don’t you see, old boy, that it makes it the worse for Tony that you and Fred were what you were at school? They measure him by the standard you two set up; it’s natural enough, but it isn’t fair.”