"Dull as ditchwater!" I exclaimed, as I tore up the communication in disgust. "An unprepossessing cub of a boy, whom his tutor permits to be fleeced at billiards and whom he is probably going to marry to his sister. Sordid as it can be. Not a thrill in it for us." "This may be my show," Rose mused, her blue eyes very wide open and innocent. "I may be able to guide the young man from the matrimonial noose. I wonder if he is really very rich. Perhaps I'll marry him myself. I suppose I could keep him on a chain." I sipped my _apéritif_ gloomily. The taste of true adventures was still upon my palate, and the obviousness of this one repelled. Our ideas as to the menacing nature of Arthur Dompers' surroundings were to some extent modified by our first visit to the Grange, which took place that night after the performance. Ella Duncombe was a rather slangy, somewhat unpleasant-looking young woman of apparently twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age. She had a bad temper, which she scarcely troubled to conceal, and conducted herself generally towards her brother's charge with more contempt than toleration. She scarcely fulfilled one's idea of an adventuress. Major Lethwaite, a guest in the house whom we had fixed upon as the person accustomed to play Arthur Dompers for a hundred pounds at billiards whenever finances ran low, was to all appearance a perfectly harmless person who played sixpenny points at bridge and thought sixpenny pool excessive. Laura Richardson, a friend of Ella's, was just an ordinary, fairly well-bred, good-looking but rather boisterous young person. Mrs. Scatterwell, whose place apparently was that of chaperon, was a handsome and rather silent woman, whose sole interest seemed to be centred in Duncombe himself. The ménage was perhaps a curious one, but scarcely suspicious. Our host himself appeared to have no reserves except on the subject of his young charge. "After the war was a bit of a knock for most of us," he remarked meditatively, as we men sat in the smoking room of the Grange after a very excellent supper. "Here are you, Lister, with a game arm, going round the country entertaining, more or less, I take it, for your living. I tried every job that was offered me and did very little good at any of them. Last of all I took this bear-leading on, and, between you and me, I sometimes wish to God I hadn't!" "Why?" I asked. "The boy seems amiable enough." "He seems so," Duncombe assented drily, "but the fact of it is that he is innately clumsy and innately deceitful. There is no sport for which he shows the least aptitude. I've tried them all with the same result. The only thing he can do is swim, and even then it's hard work to get him into the sea unless the sun shines. He hasn't the slightest taste; I am bound by the trustees' deed to allow him pocket money at the rate of a hundred pounds a month, and half of it he spends in buying most outrageous clothes. You know who he is, I suppose?" "Not an idea," I replied.