of the long straggling village, towards Reading, a small, old-fashioned cottage, picturesque in its ivy mantle, with deep mullions, diamond panes, and oaken doors. A year ago an old maiden lady, who had resided there for a quarter of a century, had died, and the village had been thrown into a state of commotion, as villages are wont to be, by the arrival of new comers—Captain Erle Brooker, his daughter Liane, and Nellie Bridson, her companion. The latter was daughter of Jack Bridson, a brother officer of Brooker’s. Left an orphan at nine years of age she had been brought up by the Captain, and throughout her whole life had been Liane’s inseparable friend. Soon, however, the village gossips found food for talk. The furniture they brought with them bore the distinct impress of having been purchased secondhand, the maid-of-all-work was a buxom Frenchwoman who bought stuff, for soups and salads, and the two girls habitually spoke French when together, in preference to English. Hence they were at once dubbed “fine, finnikin’ foreigners,” and regarded with suspicion by all the country folk from Beech Hill away to Silchester.

The thin-faced vicar made a formal call, as vicars will, but, as might be expected, received but a cold welcome from the ex-cavalry officer, and this fact spreading rapidly throughout the district, no one else ever crossed their threshold. This social ostracism annoyed Brooker, not for his own sake, but for that of the girls. The reason he had decided to live in the country in preference to London, was, first because it was cheaper, and secondly, because he had a vague idea that both girls would enter a pleasant and inexpensive circle where the dissipations would be mainly in the form of tea and tennis. In this, however, he and they had been sorely disappointed.

Zertho had spoken the truth. Stratfield Mortimer was indeed deadly dull after Ostend or the Riviera. He was getting already tired of posing as a half-pay officer, and speaking to nobody except the postmistress or the garrulous father of the local inn-keeper. Yet the one thing needful was money, and since he had renounced gambling, he had had scarcely sufficient to live from hand to mouth. Yet, although he had hardly a sou in his pocket, his imperturbable good humour never deserted him. His career had, indeed, been full of strange vicissitudes; of feast and fast, of long nights and heavy play, of huge stakes won and lost with smile or curse, of fair game and sharping, of fleecing youngsters and bluffing his elders in nearly every health-resort in Europe. Easy-going to a fault, he bore his fifty years merrily, with scarcely a grey hair in his head, and although his ruddy, well-shaven 

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