his voice as in his attentions, and it was a serious preoccupation with the dinner-givers whether he would make the evening go off delightfully by singing one of his songs with that enchanting high C, or leave it to its native dulness by refusing to sing at all. The moods and phases of the tyrannical tenor were, in fact, watched as eagerly by the expectant hostess as the antics of the needle on the eve of a picnic. The one house of that side of the county where people did not bore themselves was Dullerton Court. They congregated here, predetermined to enjoy something more than eating and drinking; and they were never disappointed. There was nothing in the entertainments themselves to explain this fact; the house was indeed on a grander scale of architecture, more palatial than any other country mansion in those parts; but the people who met there, and chatted and laughed and went away in high satisfaction with themselves and each other, were the same who congregated in the other houses to yawn and be bored, and go away grumbling. The secret of the difference lay entirely in the host. Sir Simon Harness came into the world endowed with a faculty that predestined him to rule over a certain class of men--the dull and dreary class; people who have no vital heat of their own, but are for ever trying to warm themselves at other people’s fires. He had, moreover, the genius of hospitality in all its charms. He welcomed every commonplace acquaintance with a heartiness that put the visitor in instantaneous good-humor with himself and his host and all the world. Society was his life; he could not live without it. He enjoyed his fellow-creatures, and he delighted in having them about him; his house was open to his friends at all times and seasons. What else was a house good for? What pleasure could a man take in his house, unless it was full of friends? Unhappily for Dullerton, Sir Simon was a frequent absentee. Some said that he could not stand its dulness for long at a time, and that this was why he was continually on the road to Paris and Vienna and the sunny shores of Italy and Spain. But this could not be true; you had only to witness his mercurial gayety in the midst of his Dullerton friends, and hear the ring of his loud, manly voice when he shook them by the hand and bade them welcome, to be convinced that he enjoyed them to the full as much as they enjoyed him. It is true that since M. de la Bourbonais had come to be his neighbor, the squire was less of a rover than formerly. When he was at home, he spent a great deal of time at The Lilies--a circumstance which gave Dullerton a great deal to talk about, and raised the reserved, courteous recluse a great many pegs in the estimation of the county. The baronet and his friend had many points of sympathy besides the primary one of old hereditary friendship, though they were as dissimilar in tastes and character as any two could be. This dissimilarity was, however, a part of the mutual attraction.