‘He has not lost time, at any rate,’ quoth the brisk little gentlewoman, looking up from her letter. ‘He is coming this very afternoon. Well, I’m glad to find young men are not altogether too lazy to exert themselves in anybody’s business but their own. Horace, I’ll thank you to meet the 4.15 train this afternoon. It will look more polite if you go in person. He will remain the night—I am glad to see he is not too stiff or too proud for that—so I will take care he has a good dinner. Nothing like a good dinner to put a man in a good temper. If it were young Torwood, now, I’d have a few of his father’s old friends in to meet him; as it is, I suppose he would not thank me for the attention, and would only be politely bored. Well, well! one can’t have perfection; and Mr. Debenham has acted in a very gentlemanlike manner throughout. Let me see, now. Soup and salmon, of course, and a light _entrée_ or two—two will be enough, I think; saddle of mutton, and two of my best chickens; pity game is not in season, but that can’t be helped. There’s that Stilton in prime condition, and sweets and fruits; but he won’t care for them, I imagine. I think he won’t find much fault with my father’s wines, however. Yes, we can give him as good a dinner as need be, and show him what Whitbury hospitality is like. I must go and talk to cook.’ Miss Marjory hastened away, her household keys jangling as she moved, to interview her model cook, and consult over Tor’s dinner. Ethel laughed, and so did her brother. ‘She talks dreadfully against young men,’ said he, ‘but she does not seem altogether indifferent when one is coming.’ ‘I think it’s very good-natured of Mr. Debenham to come all this way,’ remarked Ethel. ‘I hope Cousin Marjory will not tease him very much, or bother his life out with her theories.’ ‘Cousin Marjory is a clever woman, Ethel,’ returned Horace. ‘She does not bore people half so much as you fancy.’ ‘She never bores me,’ Ethel said hastily, ‘because I am so fond of her; but she is funny, you know, Horace, and says one thing one day and quite another the next, and always seems to want to argue everything with you. One never knows what she will say next, and she doesn’t care whom she snubs.’ ‘That is the chief beauty of it,’ laughed Horace. ‘She is so delightfully impartial that we all get it alike. Never you mind, Ethel: her bark is worse than her bite; and, depend upon it, Whitbury would never be the place it is, if it were not for her sharp tongue. They all say that it is she who keeps all the tradespeople up to the mark, to say nothing of stopping society here from stagnating through idleness.’ Certainly Miss Marjory was not going to let anything stagnate that day. Within and without, all her household were busily employed making the old place look its brightest.