when Clovis made a belated appearance at the breakfast-table the
bargain had been struck.

"Just think," said Mrs. Sangrail sleepily; Lady Bastable has very
kindly asked you to stay on here while I go to the MacGregors'."

Clovis said suitable things in a highly unsuitable manner, and
proceeded to make punitive expeditions among the breakfast dishes
with a scowl on his face that would have driven the purr out of a
peace conference. The arrangement that had been concluded behind
his back was doubly distasteful to him. In the first place, he
particularly wanted to teach the MacGregor boys, who could well
afford the knowledge, how to play poker-patience; secondly, the
Bastable catering was of the kind that is classified as a rude
plenty, which Clovis translated as a plenty that gives rise to
rude remarks. Watching him from behind ostentatiously sleepy
lids, his mother realized, in the light of long experience, that
any rejoicing over the success of her manoeuvre would be
distinctly premature. It was one thing to fit Clovis into a
convenient niche of the domestic jig-saw puzzle; it was quite
another matter to get him to stay there.

Lady Bastable was wont to retire in state to the morning-room
immediately after breakfast and spend a quiet hour in skimming
through the papers; they were there, so she might as well get
their money's worth out of them. Politics did not greatly
interest her, but she was obsessed with a favourite foreboding
that one of these days there would be a great social upheaval, in
which everybody would be killed by everybody else. "It will come
sooner than we think," she would observe darkly; a mathematical