But when Lady Mary also wrote tenderly from Scarborough, to ask if she could be of any use helping to entertain his guests, he felt it imperative to draw the line, and wrote a grateful effusion to his aunt, saying that he could not think of asking her to leave a place where he felt sure she was deriving spiritual and temporal benefit, in order to assist at so unprofitable a festivity as a shooting-party. He mentioned casually that Lady Grace Lawrence, Miss Deyncourt, and Miss Wyndham were to be of the party, which details he imagined might have an interest for her amid her graver reflections. The subject of Ruth's coming certainly had a prominent place in his own graver reflections. For the last fortnight, as he went from house to house, he had been wondering how he could meet her again, and, when Mr. Alwynn's letter concerning the charters was forwarded to him, a sudden inspiration made him then and there send the invitation which had arrived at Slumberleigh Rectory a few days before. He groaned in spirit as he wrote it, at the thought of Mrs. Alwynn disporting herself, dressed in the brightest colors, among his other guests; and it was with a feeling of thankfulness that he found Ruth and Mr. Alwynn were coming without her. He had felt very little interest so far in the party, which, with the exception of the Hope-Actons, had been long arranged, but now he found himself looking forward to it with actual impatience, and he returned home a day before the time, instead of an hour or two before his guests were expected, as was his wont. The Wyndhams and Hope-Actons, with Lady Grace in tow, were the first to appear upon the scene. Mr. Alwynn and Ruth arrived a few hours later, amid a dropping fire of young men and gun-cases, who kept on turning up at intervals during the afternoon, and, according to the mysterious nocturnal habits of their kind, till late into the night. If ever a man appears to advantage it is on his native hearth, and as Charles stood on his in the long hall, where it was the habit of the house to assemble before dinner, Ruth found that her attempts at conversation were rather thrown away upon Lady Grace, with whom she had been renewing an old acquaintance, and whose interest, for the time being, entirely centred in the carved coats of arms and heraldic designs with which the towering white stone chimney-piece was covered. Lady Grace was one of those pretty, delicate creatures who remind one of a very elaborate rose-bud. There was an appearance of ultra-refinement about her, a look of that refinement which is in itself a weakness, a poverty of blood, so to speak, the opposite and more pleasing but equally unhealthy extreme of coarseness. She looked very pretty as, having left Ruth, she stood by Charles, passing her little pink hand over the lowest carvings, dim and worn with the heat of many generations of fires, and listened with rapt attention to his answers to her questions.