It was the old English custom and the old Irish custom, too. In the reign of William the Conqueror people dined at eleven A.M. or was it ten? Then, as civilisation advanced, the dinner hour stole forward. In the time of the Georges it reached four o'clock. In Ireland, the most conservative country on earth, some people even still sit down to table at four--in Charleston every one does. One would not change the custom for worlds, just as one would not change the old box pews of St. Michael's or replace the cannon on the Battery with modern ordinance. Richard Pinckney did not dine at home that day. He was dining with the Rhetts in Calhoun Street, so Miss Pinckney said as they sat down to table. She sniffed as she said it, for the Rhetts, though one of the best families in the town, were people not of her way of thinking. The two Rhett girls had each a motor-car of her own and drove it--abomination! The automobile ranked in her mind with the telephone as an invention of the devil. Phyl had not seen Richard Pinckney since the morning and now he was dining out. Her heart had warmed to him at the station on the way to Vernons, and at breakfast he had appeared to her as a quite different person to the Richard Pinckney who had come to Kilgobbin, more boyish and frank, less of a man of the world. She had not seen him since he left the room at breakfast-time to look after her luggage. Miss Pinckney said he had gone off "somewhere or another" and grumbled at him for going off leaving his breakfast not quite finished, she said that he was always "scatter braining about" either at the yacht club or somewhere else. Phyl, as she sat now at the dining-table with the dead and gone Mascarene men and women looking at her from the canvases on the wall, felt ever so slightly hurt. Youth calls to youth irrespective of sex. She felt as a young person feels when another young person shows indifference. Then came the thought: was he avoiding her? Was he angry still about the affair at Kilgobbin, or was it just that he did not want to be bothered talking to her, looked on her as a nuisance in the house, a guest of no interest to him and yet to whom he had to be polite? She could not tell. Neither could she tell why the problem exercised her mind in the way it did. Even at Kilgobbin, despite the fact of her antagonism towards him, Pinckney had possessed the power of disturbing her mind and making her think about him in a way that no one else had ever succeeded in doing. No one else had made her feel the short-comings in the household _menage_ at Kilgobbin, no one else had made her so fiercely critical of herself and her belongings. She did not recognise the fact, but the fact was there, that it was a necessity of her being to stand well in this man's eyes.