CHAPTER IV


A fortnight or so after the moving incidents that have just been
recited, Miss Frederica Coppinger, and her nephew, St. Lawrence of
that ilk, were spending a long and agreeable Sunday afternoon with
their relatives at Mount Music, elders and youngsters being
segregated, after their kind, and to their mutual happiness.

Major Talbot-Lowry, very well pleased with himself, very tall and
authoritative, was standing, from force of habit, on the rug in front
of the fire-place in the Mount Music drawing-room, and was
cross-examining Miss Coppinger on her proposed arrangements for
herself and her nephew, while he drank his tea in gulps, each
succeeded by burnishing processes, with a brilliant silk bandanna
handkerchief, such as are necessitated by a long and drooping
moustache.

All good-looking people are aware of their good looks, but the gift of
enjoying them, that had been lavishly bestowed on Dick, is denied to
many; on the other hand, the companion gift, of realising when they
are becoming pleasures of memory, had been withheld from him. Dick was
of the happy temperament that believes in the exclusive immortality of
his own charms, and he was now enjoying his conversation with his
cousin none the less for the discovery that Miss Coppinger, who was
younger than he, had preserved her youth very much less successfully