The men of the party were all excellent sportsmen and good fellows, and the women more than usually delightful representatives of English society. As a matter of fact, the men were all,--like Kenyon's father,--living on their wits and just avoiding criminal prosecution by the eighth of an inch. They called themselves racing men, which, translated into cold English, means that they were people of no ostensible means of livelihood, who attended every race meeting and backed horses on credit, taking their winnings and owing their losses until chased by crook solicitors. They all bore names well known in English history. They had all passed through the best schools and either Oxford, Cambridge or Sandhurst. One or two of them were still in the army. One had been requested to resign from the navy, the King having no further use for his services, and one was a Member of Parliament, having previously been hammered in the other house,--that is to say the Stock Exchange. The women of the party were either wives of these men or not, as the case may be. At any rate they were good to look at, amusing to talk to, and apparently without a care in the world. And if Lord Shropshire, in welcoming Peter to his famous house, had said, like the spider to the fly, "Come into my parlor so that whatever you have about you may be sucked dry by us," he would have been strictly truthful. Several other such men as Peter had gone into that web sound and whole, but they had come out again with many things to regret and forget. Who could say whether Peter would escape? XIV Peter had, as he duly reported to his mother and to Betty, a corking time at Thrapstone-Wynyates. Although an open-air man, an athlete, whose reading had always been confined to those books only that were necessary to his work,--dry law books for the most part,--Peter was far from being insensible to the mellow beauty of the house, and his imagination, uncultivated so far as any training in art or architecture went, was subconsciously stirred by the knowledge that its floors and stone walks and galleries were worn by the feet of a long line of men and women whose loves and passions and hatreds had been worked out there and whose ghostly forms in all the picturesque trappings of several centuries haunted its echoing Hall and looked down from its walls, from their places in gold frames, upon its present occupants.