IN the evening of the same day the vicar dined at Longwood. Edith accompanied him. Mr. Murdwell had the forethought to send a car for his guests, so that a mile journey on a wet night was made _en prince_. Mr. Perry-Hennington was not in a mood for dining out. A certain matter was still in abeyance, and it seemed to hang over him like a cloud. He felt it was weak and illogical to allow such an affair, which was one of simple duty, to disturb him. But somehow he was far more upset by it than he cared to own. Fortunately, the evening made no great demand upon the guests. Indeed, it proved to be an agreeable relaxation. There was nothing in the nature of a party, a fact of which the vicar had been expressly apprised beforehand; five people, to wit; Mr. Murdwell, his wife and daughter, Edith and himself. Mr. Perry-Hennington was well able to appreciate a good dinner. And in spite of his present rather disgruntled state, he did not remember ever to have had a better in the course of many years of dining out. The perfection of Parisian cooking allied to dry champagne was without a suspicion of war time economy; and though the lavishness of the menu did not march with the vicar’s recent pronouncements, it was hardly possible to rebuke it in the present case. Besides, these people were American; their wealth was said to be beyond the dreams of avarice; and to judge by the frame in which they were set, there seemed to be little need for them to economize in anything. The vicar confided to Edith afterward that he had found their new neighbors “most entertaining.” And this was strictly true. Intellectually he was not quite so ossified as his theological outfit made him appear. Behind the arrogance, the dogmatism, the closed mind, was a certain shrewd man-of-the-worldliness, conceived on broad and genial lines, which is seldom lacking in the English upper class. And of that class Mr. Perry-Hennington was not an unworthy specimen. He could tell a story with anyone; he knew, had known, and was connected with many persons whom the world regards as interesting; he was traveled, sociable, distinguished in manner, and the impression he made upon his host and upon his hostess more particularly--which after all was the more important matter--was decidedly favorable. Mr. Murdwell was a man of international reputation, though sprung from quite small beginnings in his native Ohio. And behind the sophisticated naïveté of Jooly his wife, and Bud his daughter, was a well-marked tendency to think in dukes and duchesses. They had known them on the Riviera, had studied them in hotels and country houses in divers lands, and there was little doubt that sooner or later Bud would burgeon into a princess.