She

bore the assaults on her patience and temper wonderfully, but at last her girlish gravity gave way; yet even in yielding to the irresistible provocation, she did not join in Major Pollock's laugh. She looked across with halfshy frankness and laughed a deprecating appeal to Sir William, who coloured to the roots of his hair as he smiled slowly back to her. was like an angel, Sir William vowed, with a swelling heart, and he was inspired and emboldened to take a step on which he would not have ventured earlier. When the game was finished and everybody rose, he happened to be standing near Iris for a moment. In that moment he had 'the impudence,' as he called it afterwards, to speak to her for a second time aside, to beg her pardon specially.

'I am sorry for what took place during dinner,' he muttered. 'Lady Fermor has been good enough to look over it, but I behaved like a sulky brute.'

She glanced up at him with a light kindling in her hazel eyes, her face grew grave, but it was very gentle and sweet in its womanly gravity. She spoke with generous impulsiveness, 'Don't apologise, I am sure you did quite right.'

The Greek Iris was said to cut the last strand of human destiny, to refresh the parched earth by pouring down rivers of waters from the lowering clouds, and then to glorify them with all the colours of the rainbow. But this English Iris unwittingly knotted instead of cutting a terrible tangle in a poor mortal's career, poured out the beginning of a flood of trouble and sorrow on his devoted head, and then shone above him in incomparable radiance, as if that could have brought any balm to his woes.

CHAPTER X.

LADY FERMOR'S NEIGHBOURLY WAYS.

THE squires of Eastham did their part by Sir William Thwaite. They all paid their respects to him and held out the right hand of fellowship to him, declaring that he was not nearly so bad as they had expected, and that now he was 'Sir William and all that,' the past had better be forgotten and he should be treated as if he had been born, cradled, and schooled in the purple. It would be hard to say exactly what the squires had expected, or what they thought of themselves. Some of them were clownish enough to this day, and not without wild ways of their own in their out-of-the-way retreats, though they had worn pink coats, sworn over grouse, handled old plate, swaggered in dining-rooms and dozed in drawing-rooms, ever since the middle-aged men were boys.

But of Sir William's fellow-squires and nearest neighbours, every one was too old to be a natural companion for him. The way of the modern world and the poverty of Eastham rendered it impossible that the county should support a population of young men of the higher rank. These lads, including the heirs of estates, were all drafted off betimes into regiments or ships, to eat their dinners in the Temple, to wear white surplices and be petted or pitied as curates, even to figure in the upper walks of trade in the larger mercantile towns, or to make shift in the colonies. The absentees who could turn up at set seasons only fluttered home like the birds the young men came to shoot in September, or, like the children and schoolboys at Christmas, or on any private emergency, or demonstration in the visitors' respective families. What remained permanently was a small residue of half-pacers, pretenders to a better position than they were entitled to, scampish young fellows of whom nothing could be made, who took their cue from Major Pollock when they were within hail of Knotley. Some of these promising young people were supposed to be trying better class farming or brewing, since

there was a great brewery in Knotley, while they plagued the hearts out of their unfortunate parents or all who were responsible for the delinquents.

With both the old and the young sets representing the squirearchy, Sir William Thwaite's total abstinence, in drinking only water or tea, was, as Lady Fermor had easily prognosticated, a great stumbling-block to familiar intercourse and social intimacy. A rumour spread abroad that Sir William had made a vulgar clamour in refusing to drink wine at Lady Fermor's table, where the choicest vintages had been wont to flow in bucketfuls. Lady Fermor had condoned the offence for her own ends, but her neighbours, who might not have the same inducement, did not feel inclined to excuse the outrage. The most sober of the elder men did not scruple to declare that total abstinence was suspicious and ominous, not to say bad form. The fellow must have suffered from D.T. Depend upon it there would be reaction and an outbreak sooner or later. There was nothing like moderation in all things. The young men in great disgust voted Sir William at once a low prig, a dissenting minister in