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"Yes.... And Mr. Ablett hasn't been found yet?" She shook her head in distress. "It still seems to have happened to somebody else; somebody we didn't know at all." Then, with a sudden grave smile which included both of them, "But you must come and have some tea."

"It's awfully decent of you," said Bill awkwardly, "but we-er-"

"You will, won't you?" she said to Antony.

"Thank you very much."

Mrs. Norbury was delighted to see them, as she always was to see any man in her house who came up to the necessary standard of eligibility.

When her life-work was completed, and summed up in those beautiful words: "A marriage has been arranged, and will shortly take place, between Angela, daughter of the late John Norbury...." then she would utter a grateful Nunc dimittis and depart in peace to a better world, if Heaven insisted, but preferably to her new son-in-law's more dignified establishment.

For there was no doubt that eligibility meant not only eligibility as a husband.

But it was not as "eligibles" that the visitors from the Red House were received with such eagerness to-day, and even if her special smile for "possibles" was there, it was instinctive rather than reasoned.

All that she wanted at this moment was news-news of Mark.

For she was bringing it off at last; and, if the engagement columns of the "Morning Post" were preceded, as in the case of its obituary columns, by a premonitory bulletin, the announcement of yesterday would have cried triumphantly to the world, or to such part of the world as mattered: "A marriage has very nearly been arranged (by Mrs. Norbury), and will certainly take place, between Angela, only daughter of the late John Norbury, and-Mark Ablett of the Red House." And, coming across it on his way to the sporting page, Bill would have been surprised.

For he had thought that, if anybody, it was Cayley.

To the girl it was neither.

She was often amused by her mother's ways; sometimes ashamed of them; sometimes distressed by them.

The Mark Ablett affair had seemed to her particularly distressing, for Mark was so obviously in league with her mother against her.

Other suitors, upon whom her mother had smiled, had been embarrassed by that championship; Mark appeared to depend on it as much as on his own attractions; great though he thought these to be.

They went a-wooing together.

It was a pleasure to turn to Cayley, that hopeless ineligible.

But alas! Cayley had misunderstood her.

She could not imagine Cayley in love until she saw it, and tried, too late, to stop it.

That was four days ago.

She had not seen him since, and now here was this letter.

She dreaded opening it.

It was a relief to feel that at least she had an excuse for not doing so while her guests were in the house.

Mrs. Norbury recognized at once that Antony was likely to be the more sympathetic listener; and when tea was over, and Bill and Angela had been dispatched to the garden with the promptness and efficiency of the expert, dear Mr. Gillingham found himself on the sofa beside her, listening to many things which were of even greater interest to him than she could possibly have hoped.

"It is terrible, terrible," she said. "And to suggest that dear Mr. Ablett-"

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