It was the tea-hour on the following day when Hurstmanceaux arrived. Everyone was in the library, a long, fine room worthy of the volumes it enshrined, of which many were rare and all well-chosen. Daddy, comfortably ensconced in a corner, with a cup in his hand and some hot buttered scone at his elbow, waited for the coming scene. The library was dimly lighted by the descending sun, which itself was dim. He saw that Hurstmanceaux did not on his entry perceive the Massarenes, and stood by Mrs. Raby’s chair for some minutes talking with her and greeting old friends; but he also saw, which surprised him, that Katherine Massarene, who was at some distance from that table and seated at another, changed countenance visibly and rose as if to leave the room, then sat down again with a pained and startled expression on her face. “She aren’t in the game,” thought Daddy. “But why the deuce does she look like that because he’s come into the room?” Mr. Massarene drew near his daughter and whispered to her: “That man just come in is Hurstmanceaux; Mrs. Raby’ll bring him up to us. Be civil.” Daddy was too far off to hear the words, but he guessed what they were; he saw that Katherine looked distressed, annoyed, perplexed, and began hurriedly to talk with the people round her. “She knows what they’re after, and she don’t like it,” thought Daddy. He could not tell that in her ears and in her memory were resounding the scornful sentences, the withering sarcasms, which had been spoken to her in the walk over the frozen fields to Great Thorpe. After a time, while Daddy watched them from his snug corner, Mrs. Raby rose and put her hand on Hurstmanceaux’s arm. “Let me present you to some friends of Clare’s whom I think you don’t know as yet,” she murmured softly; and ere he could be aware of what was being done with him, he was led off to Katherine and her father. Daddy watched the arrival of the unsuspecting chief actor with that lively interest which he always felt in his own amusement. He had no kind of sympathy with such prejudices as Ronald’s; he would himself have dined with a sweep if the sweep could have given him something unusually good to eat; but he liked prejudices in others as an element of human comedy which frequently produced the most diverting situations. “He’s the toughest fellow in creation,” he thought. “They’ll no more change him than they’ll make an ironclad into a lady’s slipper.” Ronald, although the most easy-going and unconventional of men in intimacy, had the coldness and the stiffness of the Englishman of rank when he was annoyed or felt himself outwitted. He was perfectly correct in his manner, but that manner was glacial as he realized the trap which had been laid in his path; he looked eight feet in height as he bent his head in recognition of Katherine Massarene and her father.