"Taken thirty pounds this morning!" shouted the leading door-handle, speeding towards the house. "Splendid heather honey!"
"You ought to show some interest," said my wife malignly. "Go in and look at it. He's your host!"
"Not if he were all the hosts of Midian!" I said, but I felt shaken.
"I'm going to the motor-house," I said firmly.
"Very well, I shall bathe," replied Philippa.
"I suppose you are aware that your old friend, Mr. Chichester, is at present in possession of the bathing cove," I returned, "and it might be as well to ascertain the opinion of your hostess on the subject of mixed bathing."
"Did you observe that Lord Derryclare was wearing your new motor-gloves?" said Philippa as I moved away.
I magnanimously left the last word with her.
The Derryclares were in the habit of hurling themselves, at intervals, out of civilisation, and into the wilderness, with much the same zest with which those who live in the wilderness hurl themselves into civilisation. In the wilderness, twenty miles from a railway station, they had built them a nest, and there led that variety of the simple life that is founded on good servants, old clothes, and a total indifference to weather. Wandering friends on motor tours swooped occasionally out of space; married daughters, with intervals between visits to be filled in, arrived without warning, towing reluctant husbands (who had been there before). Lost men, implicated with Royal Commissions and Congested Districts, were washed in at intervals; Lady Derryclare said she never asked anyone; people came.
It is true that she had asked us, but the invitation had been given on our wedding-day, and had been put away with our duplicate wedding presents; we had now disinterred it, because I had bought a motor, and was still in the stage of enthusiasm when the amateur driver will beat up visits for his wife to pay. I do not know how Chichester got there; he, like Lady Derryclare, dated from the benighted period before Philippa knew me, and I may admit that, in common with most husbands, I am not attracted by the male friends of my wife's youth. If Chichester had been the type she fancied, was I merely a Super-Chichester?
Chichester was an elderly young man, worn smooth by much visiting in country houses, and thoroughly competent in the avocations proper to his career. He knew the best "stands" at half the shoots in Ireland, and could tell to half a crown the value set upon each by the keeper; if you gave him a map he could put a pudgy finger upon the good cooks as promptly as an archbishop upon his cathedral towns; he played a useful and remunerative game of bridge; to see his eye, critical, yet alight with healthful voracity, travelling down the array of dishes on the side-table at breakfast, and arranging unhesitatingly the order in which they were to be attacked, was a lesson to the heedless who blunt the fine edge of appetite with porridge.