put their own in, with the result that they sustained embarrassing
losses. I mention these details incidentally to show that Miss Le
Mesurier of to-day is directly descended from ancestors of predatory
instincts, who did not go a-hunting for victims, but unobtrusively
attracted them in a passive, lazy way which was none the less effectual.'

Conway's patience was exhausted at this period of the disquisition.

'I never heard such a hotch-potch of nonsense in my life,' he said.

'I admit,' returned Fielding with unruffled complacency, 'that I aimed at
an allegory rather than a pedantic narrative of facts. I was endeavouring
to explain Clarice Le Mesurier on the fashionable principle of heredity.'

It flashed across Drake that if Fielding had described, though with some
exaggeration, an actual phase of Miss Le Mesurier's character, she must
have been driven to make the first advance towards his acquaintance by a
motive of unusual urgency. The notion, however, did but flash and flicker
out. He had no mental picture of the girl to fix her within his view; he
knew not, in fact, whether she was girl or woman. She was to him just an
abstraction, and Drake was seldom inclined for the study of abstractions.
His curiosity might, perhaps, have been stronger had Mallinson related to
him the way in which he had been received at the house of the Le
Mesuriers after his dinner with Drake. When he arrived he found the
guests staring hard at each other silently, with the vacant expression
which comes of an effort to understand a recitation in a homely dialect
from the north of the Tweed. He waited in the doorway and suddenly saw
Miss Le Mesurier rise from an embrasure in the window and take half a
step towards him. Then she paused and resumed her seat.