Lord Flintshire laughed. “And only last night I was telling Sidney that his sense of duty towards them was too strong.” Again Lady Sunningdale’s attention rushed headlong away with the bit in its teeth; it was so rapid that one could not say it wandered. “The last act of the ‘Götterdämmerung’!” she exclaimed. “My dear, they gave it superbly the other night; at Covent Garden, too, of all places,--though the ravens did come in ten bars too soon, and Siegfried had to throw them away. I never slept for a week afterwards.” The performance in question, therefore, must have taken place at least a week ago, for there was no manner of doubt that when Martin arrived, an hour or so after lunch, Lady Sunningdale was snatching a brief interval of much-needed repose after her sen’night vigil under the cedar on the lawn. The rest of the party, with the exception of Stella Plympton, had dispersed to spend the afternoon in what she considered the violent English fashion; that is to say, Frank Yorkshire and her brother had gone to play golf. Lord Flintshire had taken Lady Sunningdale’s daughter for a ride, and Lord Sunningdale himself, who had an insatiable mania for losing large sums of money in what he euphemistically called farming, had gone to feel horses’ legs and poke pigs in the back with the Scotch bailiff. Martin, in consequence, who had walked over the fields from the terrible parsonage and approached his uncle’s house from the garden side, found an idyll of placidity occupying the stage below the cedar, for a young woman of about his own age was sitting with an air of extreme content doing nothing whatever, and in a basket-chair close by was Lady Sunningdale, recuperating after the “Götterdämmerung.” Martin had formed a somewhat copious subject of conversation during lunch, and it required no particular exercise of ingenuity on Stella’s part to guess who the tall, straw-hatted figure was. From him again she looked at Lady Sunningdale’s slumbers, and glancing back to Martin raised her eyebrows, as if to ask what had better be done. Then she rose noiselessly from her chair, and beckoning to him with a little amused, friendly gesture, walked quietly away from the immediate neighbourhood. “You must be Mr. Challoner,” she said, holding out her hand; “and Lady Sunningdale, apparently exhausted by the prospect of your arrival, is snatching a few moments of repose. What are we to do, then? Shall we wake her and risk her immediate displeasure, or let her sleep and risk her ultimate displeasure? We are quite certain to decide wrong.”