He looked round with a smile, saw that Edward Newbury was still in the box, and whispered, mischievously: "Hoddon Grey, too, I think, will not be empty?" Marcia kept an indifferent face. "I dare say. You're coming?" Sir Wilfrid nodded. "Oh, _have_ you heard--?" She murmured to him behind her fan. Sir Wilfrid knew all their history--had been her father's most intimate friend. She gave him a rapid account of Coryston's disinheriting. The old man rose, his humorous eyes suddenly grave. "We'll talk of this--at Coryston. Ah, Newbury--I took your chair--I resign. Hullo, Lester--good evening. Heavens, there's the curtain going up. Good night!" He hurried away. Newbury moved forward, his eager look on Marcia. But she turned, smiling, to the young librarian. "You haven't seen this ballet, Mr. Lester?--Schumann's 'Carnival'? Oh, you mustn't stand so far back. We can make room, can't we?" She addressed Newbury, and before he knew what had happened, the chairs had been so manipulated that Lester sat between Marcia and Newbury, while Waggin had drawn back into the shadow. The eyes of Marcia's duenna twinkled. It pleased her that this magnificent young man, head, it was said, of the young High Church party, distinguished in many ways, and as good as he was handsome, was not to have too easy a game. Marcia had clearly lost her head a little at the Shrewsbury House ball; and was now trying to recover it. CHAPTER IV After one of those baffling fortnights of bitter wind and cold, which so often mark the beginning of an English May, when all that the spring has slowly gained since March seems to be confiscated afresh by returning winter, the weather had repented itself, the skies had cleared, and suddenly, under a flood of sunshine, there were blue-bells in the copses, cowslips in the fields, a tawny leaf breaking on the oaks, a new cheerfulness in the eyes and gait of the countryman. A plain, pleasant-looking woman sat sewing out-of-doors, in front of a small verandaed cottage, perched high on a hillside which commanded a wide view of central England. The chalk down fell beneath her into a sheath of beech woods; the line of hills, slope behind slope, ran westward to the sunset, while eastward they mounted to a wooded crest beyond which the cottage could not look. Northward, beginning some six hundred feet below the cottage, stretched a wide and varied country, dotted with villages and farms, with houses and woods, till it lost itself in the haze of a dim horizon. A man of middle age, gray-headed, spare in figure, emerged from one of the French windows of the cottage. "Marion, when did you say that you expected Enid?" "Between three and four, papa." "I don't believe Glenwilliam himself will get here at all. There will be a long Cabinet this afternoon, and another to-morrow probably--Sunday or no Sunday!"