you're—what?—thirty-four now."

"Yes," said Dick. "Thirty-four. Time to think of settling down, eh?"

The Squire brightened. "Yes, that's just it," he said. "Time to think of settling down. You've had enough soldiering—much more than I had. I never expected you would stick to it so long."

"I don't want to leave the service yet," said Dick calmly. "I'm down here pretty often—almost all my leave."

"Yes, yes, I know," said the Squire. "But if—if—— Well, look here, Dick—no use beating about the bush—why can't you get married?"

Dick smiled. "It wouldn't be a bad scheme," he said.

The Squire was pleased. He was getting on splendidly. "You feel that," he said. "Well, I haven't liked to say anything, but it's been on my mind for a long time." He then recapitulated the reasons why he thought Dick should marry, as he had enunciated them to Mrs. Clinton—his position as eldest son and heir to a fine property, his advancing age, the inadvisability of looking to Melbury Park as the cradle for a successor to the emoluments and amenities of Kencote, or of leaving it to Humphrey, the second son, to provide an heir. "The fact is, you ought to do it for your own sake," he wound up, "as well as for the sake of the place."

"Whom do you want me to marry?" asked Dick, with a shade of flippancy.

"Oh, well, I'd leave that to you," the Squire conceded handsomely. "You've a lot to offer. I should think you could pretty well take your pick—must have had plenty of opportunities all these years. You needn't look for money, though it's always useful. Any nice girl of good birth—of course you wouldn't want to marry one who wasn't. Good heavens! there must be a score of them presented every year, and you have been about London now for ten or twelve years. Do you mean to say you haven't got one in your mind?"

"Haven't you?" asked Dick.

"Well, if you like to consult me, why not Grace Ettien? Old Humphrey Meadshire would be delighted. She is his favourite granddaughter, and I'm sure he would like to see her married before he goes."

"Grace is a charming girl," replied Dick. "But I don't want to marry my cousin."

"Cousin! My dear fellow, old Humphrey and your grandfather were first cousins. You're surely not going to let that stand in the way."

"I've known her ever since she was a baby. She's a baby now. It would be like marrying one of the Twankies."

The Squire began to get fussed. "You're talking nonsense, Dick," he said. "She must be at least twenty-one. The fact is you have left it so long that an ordinary girl of a marriageable age seems a child to you. You'll be taking up with a widow next."

There was an appreciable pause before Dick asked, "Well, should you object so much to that?"

"Of course I should," said the Squire, "—for you. I shouldn't mind in the case of Humphrey, if she wasn't too old, and had enough money for the pair of them. I'm not going to pay any more of his debts. I'm sick of it."

Dick allowed the conversation to travel down this byroad for a time, and when the Squire brought it back to the original track, said, "Well, I'll think over what you say. But I don't know that I should care, now, about marrying a young girl."

The Squire turned this over in his mind, looking down on his plate, and his brows came together. "What do you mean?" he asked shortly. "You wouldn't want to marry an old woman."

Dick took his cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it.

"When I marry," he said decisively, "it will probably be a woman of nearer thirty than twenty."

The Squire made the best of it. "Oh, well—as long as she's not over thirty," he said. "Girls don't marry so young as they used to. But—well, you must think of an heir, Dick."

Dick made no reply to this, and the conversation ended.

CHAPTER III

EXIT MISS BIRD

Miss Bird arose on the next morning to find her window glazed with frost, and it was characteristic of her and of the house in which she had lived for over thirty years that her first thought was, "No hunting to-day"; although the deprivation could not be expected to hold any disappointment for herself, or indeed to affect her in any way.

Her second thought marked a drop to the sombre uneasiness in which she had spent wakeful hours during the night. She would not rise many more times in this familiar room, nor look out on to a scene which she had come to know so well at all seasons of the year that she could not help loving it. She would have liked to see the trees of the park, for a farewell, in their early June dress, the grass about them powdered with the yellow of buttercups. But she hoped so to see them again. She had been made to feel that she was parting from friends, that she was by virtue of her long and faithful service part of the family, that she would not lose them altogether. The Squire had said the day before, when he had made known to her that he had heard of her projected departure, "You must come and see us, you know, Miss Bird. The house won't be like itself without you."

Could anything be more gratifying—and from such a man? Mrs. Clinton, of course, had been kindness itself, had said just the right things to make a person feel herself valued, and said them as if she meant them, as no doubt, dear lady, she did, for she was always sincere. And the darling children had cried—she should never forget that as long as she lived—when she had told them that she was going. Here the simple lady found a tear trickling down her own sharp nose, and put a hairpin in her mouth while she wiped it away.

It seemed impossible that she should really be going. It was just upon thirty years since she had first come to Kencote, and it seemed like yesterday. She summoned up a rueful little smile when she recalled, in the light of her now assured position as "a member of the family," her palpitating nervousness on her introduction to the great house, so different from anything she had known. She had never been "out" before. She had had a good education, for those days, in the day school that her mother, the doctor's widow, and her elder sister had carried on in a little town in which she had been born, and had taught in it till she was twenty-eight. Then, after deep consultation, she had answered Mrs. Clinton's advertisement, and, her references having proved satisfactory, had been engaged to impart the rudiments of education to a child of five, which she had modestly thought she was as capable of doing as anybody, and at a salary that seemed to her munificent.

She remembered arriving at Kencote on a spring evening and being received by Mrs. Clinton, the pretty young wife and mother, who had been almost as shy as herself, but had been so anxious that everything should be "nice" for her that she had soon lost her awe of the big house and the many servants; and even the figure in the background from which all the splendour around her emanated lost some of its imaginative terror, since the lady of the house had proved so accessibly human. She had thought the little boy, whom she had been taken to see in bed, a darling, and so quaint when he asked her solemnly if she could jump a pony over a log, because he could. She had liked his quiet, elderly nurse, who had come to talk to her in her schoolroom when he had gone to sleep. She had called her "miss," and shown that she had no wish to "presume," but only the wish to be friendly, and they had, in fact, remained friends for years. She had been greatly pleased with the size and comfort of her schoolroom, which she had entirely to herself, to read or write or play the piano in, outside hours of lessons, which were at first as short as was conceivably possible. And she had not in the least expected that there would be a maid for the schoolroom, who was, as she wrote to her sister, practically her own maid, calling her in the morning and bringing her a cup of tea, lighting a fire for her every evening