got to say!" exclaimed Beryl, to whom anything was thrilling and amusing
if you did it in a troop.

Mrs. Steffink made a laughing protest, but gave a virtual consent by
saying, "We must all wrap up well, then." The idea seemed a
scatterbrained one to her, and almost heathenish, but if afforded an
opportunity for "throwing the young people together," and as such she
welcomed it. Mr. Horace Bordenby was a young man with quite substantial
prospects, and he had danced with Beryl at a local subscription ball a
sufficient number of times to warrant the authorised inquiry on the part
of the neighbours whether "there was anything in it." Though Mrs.
Steffink would not have put it in so many words, she shared the idea of
the Russian peasantry that on this night the beast might speak.

The cow-house stood at the junction of the garden with a small paddock,
an isolated survival, in a suburban neighbourhood; of what had once been
a small farm. Luke Steffink was complacently proud of his cow-house and
his two cows; he felt that they gave him a stamp of solidity which no
number of Wyandottes or Orpingtons could impart. They even seemed to
link him in a sort of inconsequent way with those patriarchs who derived
importance from their floating capital of flocks and herbs, he-asses and
she-asses. It had been an anxious and momentous occasion when he had had
to decide definitely between "the Byre" and "the Ranch" for the naming of
his villa residence. A December midnight was hardly the moment he would
have chosen for showing his farm-building to visitors, but since it was a
fine night, and the young people were anxious for an excuse for a mild
frolic, Luke consented to chaperon the expedition. The servants had long
since gone to bed, so the house was left in charge of Bertie, who
scornfully declined to stir out on the pretext of listening to bovine
conversation.