'I might ask the same question of you,' said Uffington. 'I don't suppose you are particularly wedded to any of the wildly-exciting diversions you have named, and yet here you are, looking as much at home as if you lived in the place.' 'O, I am staying over at Portslade, shooting with Billy Norreys, who has got a whole houseful of people there, and I only came over because I got a confounded twist of tic last night, and have emptied my neuraline bottle.' 'You must have done a deal of shooting, or the sun must be considerably more powerful down here than it is in other parts of the country, to have turned you that colour, Lydyeard,' said Uffington, with a smile. 'You look like a young brave on the war-path.' 'This is continental painting, sir, not English work,' said Toni Lydyeard. 'I had an invitation to go North with McDiarmid; man who used to be in the regiment--you must remember him--and who has since come into a lot of money, and got the best moor, they tell me, in Aberdeenshire; but I find I am growing a little too old for that kind of gunning; I don't walk as lightly as I did, and--well, I suppose the truth is, I don't care to let the fellows see that I am ageing a bit. Pheasant-shooting I can manage easily enough; so to fill up the time between Goodwood and the last of August, when I was due with Billy Norreys, I went abroad.' 'Where did you go to?' asked Uffington, with an assumption of interest; for he was rather glad to find some one whom he liked, and who in his way amused him, to speak to. 'O, Hombourg, Baden, and all that round,' said Lydyeard. 'Never saw places so altered in my life--just like going into Hurlingham in the winter, don't you know? There are the places which one knows so well, the rooms and the gardens and the orchestra where the band plays, and the hotels and all that kind of thing, but there is nobody there; no French--not a single Frenchman or Frenchwoman, and you know what crowds there used to be--and no English to speak of only a few old boys drinking the waters for gout and that sort of thing. The whole place is filled up with Germans, sir, fat stuffy men who do nothing but eat and smoke, and fat fubsy women who do nothing but eat and knit; horrible people! very domesticated, I daresay, but I hate that sort of middle-class domesticity.' 'Well, there is one comfort, then, to think that domesticity in the upper classes doesn't trouble them very much, does it, Lydyeard?' said Uffington with a smile. 'No, by Jove, not at all,' said Tom Lydyeard. 'By the way, talking of that, you recollect my showing you Lady Forestfield at the Opera that night, when that French fellow De Tournefort was in her box paying her such attention?' 'Certainly,' said Uffington. 'Well, that affair éclatéd soon afterwards, as everybody thought it would, and Forestfield went in for a divorce, which he got.'