When the engine and its accompanying brake-van drew up at the station, Glasgow’s eye could discover no flaw in the exemplary and dead silent industry that prevailed. The shovelfuls flung by Mortheen were heavier and more frequent than those of his fellows, and even the spectacle of Lady Susan emerging in sables from the van and passing among the buckets and heaps of lime, did not seem to be noticed by so much as the lift of an eyelid. It was almost one o’clock, and the ganger, transformed into an official of submissive urbanity, sounded his whistle for the dinner-hour. The clatter of tools died out in the space of two seconds, and the men, swinging themselves into their coats, straggled out into the road, slouching, rolling, hitching, and apparently untouched by the desire of the ordinary human heart to keep step. Their employer’s picnic-party was already established in the newly-roofed kitchen of the new station, by a fire of chips and bits of plank. A luncheon-basket stood on a carpenter’s bench, a champagne-bottle on the window-sill, and Lady Susan and Slaney were sitting on boxes by the fire, eating game pie. Lady Susan had violets in her toque, and possessed more strikingly than usual that air of being very handsome that is not always given to handsome people. Behind her the empty window framed a gaunt mountain peak, a lake that frittered a myriad sparkles from its wealth of restless silver, and the grey and faint purple of the naked wood beyond it. It seemed too great a background for her powdered cheek and her upward glances at her host. “How far do you want us to walk?” she said, looking over her shoulder at the view, “all the way to that wood there? How silly of you to say the bikes would be no use!” “I don’t dispute the fact that they would have been of use to you and Major Bunbury,” replied her host, cutting the wires of the second bottle of champagne. “It’s so contemptible of you not to learn the bike,” she went on, with a manner half discontented, half brusque. “It’s all prejudice.” “I’m beginning to cultivate prejudice,” said Glasgow, retaining the cork with skill, “it’s so respectable. Churchwardens and generals and heads of departments are always prejudiced.” “I didn’t know that you were so wonderfully addicted to respectability,” said Lady Susan, with a laugh and a look that made Slaney feel rather hot--“since when, may I ask?” Lady Susan was too careless and too little disposed for the toils of finesse to foster a flirtation for its own sake; when she did find a sufficing motive, these same qualities created a startling directness of method. “Since when?” repeated Glasgow. “Oh, since I took to church-going, I suppose. Perhaps Miss Morris could tell you!” Slaney had become accustomed to these morsels flung to the memory of a past, but they never failed to remind her of the moment when she had placed herself for ever at a disadvantage.