EVEN in winter time the Manor House at Chelmhurst is a cheerful abode; the garden is no mere waste of promises kept and made; the two great yew-trees on the lawn behind the house by their spacious graciousness prevent any sense of void, nobly supported as they are by the splendid laurel hedges and the evergreen shrubberies. The long, low house, with warm red-brick walls, tiled roofs, haphazard gables and chimney-stacks, strikes rich and cozy to the eye. Behind the garden, barely divided from it by light iron railings, lies a broad meadow, with a pond and a confining belt of elms. Before the house, clearly seen over the low wall, stretches the gorse-clad common with its graceful clumps of ash-trees. Thin wraiths of country mist strayed about the common, hanging in the tall trees that surround it on almost all sides, and there was a bitter winter sting in the air, as Philip West and Fred Mortimer drove up from the station one afternoon late in November. With his long, lanky limbs, thick shock of black hair, which he had a habit of tossing from his forehead, dark blue eyes, which at times appeared to be the abode of dreams, but on occasion flashed with abundant energy, his thin, almost cadaverous face, West contrasted markedly with his companion. As ever, he was smoking a cigar, which he fidgeted between his thin fingers when it was not cocked up at the corner of his mouth. “I’m sorry Maddison could not come down; I find him a refreshing contrast to my restless self,” West said. “Besides I should like him to meet Alice Lane. She’s the sort of woman you don’t meet half a dozen times in a life. I wonder how they’d get on together.” “Are you matchmaking for others, now you’ve made your own match?” “Not a bit, Fred. That’s the one line of business I shouldn’t care to tackle. It’d do him a deuced lot of good to get married to the right woman.” “I fancy he fancies other men have generally married the right woman—for him. Which is convenient, and does not land him in lifelong responsibilities. There are so many right men and so few right women.” “Don’t agree with you a bit. The average man rubs along all right with the average woman. It’s when you get a man above or below the average that the trouble begins.” Mortimer wondered if his companion were thinking of his own recent marriage. Strikingly beautiful he knew Mrs. West to be, and in a quaint, childish way, fascinating. But that would not suffice West for long. He had tired of similar charms often enough already. The victoria swung briskly in through the gate on to the short drive, and before it had pulled up West leaped out and sprang up on to the veranda to greet his wife. “You see, Fred,” he said, laughing—“you see we haven’t forgotten our honeymoon ways yet. We haven’t arrived at the silly stage when we’re ashamed of people knowing we’re fond of one another. You’ve met Fred before, Agatha; make the best you can of him, and let him do exactly what he likes, or he’ll never come again.”