Hector entered--a big, over-big man, the glazed shirt-front already bulging out of his black waistcoat. The K.C., shorn of legal wig and trappings, did not look very dignified; nevertheless, he gave an impression of force. The sandy hair was scant on his wide mottled forehead; his eyes were a cold gray; his nose tended to the bulbous. The clean-shaven lips appeared thin and a trifle cruel; his jowl was heavy--almost the jowl of a mastiff. He had the hands of a gentleman, the feet of a clodhopper.

"Is it time for dinner?" asked the wife. The husband drew from his waistcoat pocket a heavy gold watch; consulted the hands of it; and admitted the accuracy of her suggestion.

"Then we'd better be going down," decided Aliette.

The dining-room at Moor Park possesses, or is possessed by, the largest suite of mid-Victorian mahogany ever fashioned. The sideboard, gleaming always with massive silver, occupies the entire east end of the apartment, barely leaving room for a white-paneled Adams door. Either side of the marble mantelpiece stand two colossal serving-tables. Gigantic horsehair-seated armchairs, ranged between the long red-curtained windows, spill a brood of slightly less gigantic offspring round the mastodontic board.

The mulligatawny and the cod with oyster-sauce had already been served by the two cap-and-aproned wenches, whom the rear-admiral declared to be "a damned sight better than any heavy-handed son of a gun who smoked a fellow's cigars, drank his port, and did as little work as the old bumboat-woman of Portsmouth."

Rear-Admiral Billy was enjoying himself. His jovial eyes, a little red-rimmed with age under the heavy brown thatch of his hair, kept glancing round at "his two colts and their fillies" and at that "jolly little piece in the No. 5 rig," Aliette's sister. His trim beard, grayed only at the extremities, kept wagging accompaniment to Aliette's account of the run; the course of which his hairy-backed hands were trying to trace, in bread and salt, on the table-cloth.

"'Spose you funked as usual, Adrian," rumbled the old man across the enormous table. "God knows what I've ever done to deserve a son in the church."

The Rev. Adrian, in clerical evening dress, only laughed at his father's criticism; but the Rev. Adrian's Margery fired up in defense of her spouse.

"Adrian's seen more active service than most men of his cloth," began the little aquiline, dark-haired woman. 

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