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Colin Stanier had gone straight from the tennis-court to the bathing-place in the lake below the terraced garden. His cousin Violet, only daughter of his uncle Ronald, had said that she would equip herself and follow him, and the boy had swum and dived and dived and swum waiting for her, until the dressing-bell booming from the turret had made him reluctantly quit the water. He was just half dry and not at all dressed when she came.

“Wretched luck!” she said. “Oh, Colin, do put something on!”

“In time,” said Colin; “you needn’t look!”

“I’m not looking. But it was wretched luck. Mother....”

Colin wrapped a long bath-towel round himself, foraged for cigarettes and matches in his coat pocket, and sat down by her.

“Mother?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Mother was querulous, and so she wanted some one to be querulous to.”

“Couldn’t she be querulous to herself?” asked Colin.

“No, of course not. You must have a partner or a dummy if you’re being querulous. I wasn’t more than a dummy, and so when she had finished the rest of it she was querulous about that. She said I was unsympathetic.”

“Dummies usually are,” said Colin. “Cigarette?”

“No, thanks. This one was, because she wanted to come and bathe. Did you dive off the top step?”

“Of course not. No audience,” said Colin. “What’s the use of doing anything terrifying unless you impress somebody? I would have if you had come down.”

“I should have been thrilled. Oh, by the way, Raymond has just telephoned from town to say that he’ll be here by dinner-time. He’s motoring down.”

Colin considered this. “Raymond’s the only person older than myself whom I envy,” he said. “He’s half an hour older than me. Oh, I think I envy Aunt Hester, but then I adore Aunt Hester. I only hate Raymond.”

“Just because he’s half an hour older than you?” asked the girl.

“Isn’t that enough? He gets everything just because of that unlucky half-hour. He’ll get you, too, if you’re not careful.”

Colin got up and gathered his clothes together.

“He’ll have Stanier,” he observed. “Isn’t that enough to make me detest him? Besides, he’s a boor. Happily, father detests him, too; I think father must have been like Raymond at his age. That’s the only comfort. Father will do the best he can for me. And then there’s Aunt Hester’s money. But what I want is Stanier. Come on.”

“Aren’t you going to dress?” asked Violet.

“Certainly not. As soon as I get to the house I shall have to undress and dress again.”

“Not shoes?” asked she.

“Not when the dew is falling. Oh, wet grass is lovely to the feet. We’ll skirt the terrace and go round by the lawn.”

“And why is it that you envy Aunt Hester?” asked the girl.

“Can’t help it. She’s so old and wicked and young.”

Violet laughed. “That’s a very odd reason for envying anybody,” she said. “What’s there to envy?”

“Why, the fact that she’s done it all,” said Colin frowning. “She has done all she pleased all her life, and she’s just as young as ever. If I wasn’t her nephew, she would put me under her arm, just as she did her husband a thousand years ago, and marry me to-morrow. And then you would marry Raymond, and—and there we would all be. We would play whist together. My dear, those ghastly days before we were born! Grandfather with his Garter over his worsted jacket and a kitten on his knee, and grandmamma and Aunt Janet and your father and mine! They lived here for years like that. How wonderful and awful!”

“They’re just as wonderful now,” said Violet. “And....”

“Not quite so awful; grandfather isn’t here now, and he must have been the ghastliest. Besides, there’s Aunt Hester here to tone them up, and you and I, if it comes to that. Not to mention Raymond. I love seeing my father try to behave nicely to Raymond. Dead failure.”

Colin tucked his towel round him; it kept slipping first from one shoulder, then the other.

“I believe Raymond is falling in love with you,” he said. “He’ll propose to you before long. Your mother will back him up, so will Uncle Ronald. They would love to see you mistress here. And you’d like it yourself.”

“Oh—like it?” said she. She paused a moment. “Colin, you know what I feel about Stanier,” she said. “I don’t think anybody knows as well as you. You’ve got the passion for it. Wouldn’t you give anything for it to be yours? Look at it! There’s nothing like it in the world!”

They had come up the smooth-shaven grass slope from the lake, and stood at the entrance through the long yew-hedge that bordered the line of terraces. There were no ghastly monstrosities in its clipped bastion; no semblance of peacocks and spread tails to crown it: it flowed downwards, a steep, uniform embattlement of stiff green, towards the lake, enclosing the straight terraces and the deep borders of flower-beds. The topmost of these terraces was paved, and straight from it rose the long two-storied façade of mellow brick balustraded with the motto, “Nisi Dominus ædificavit,” in tall letters of lead, and from floor to roof it was the building of that Colin Stanier whose very image and incarnation stood and looked at it now.

So honest and secure had been the workmanship that in the three centuries which had elapsed since first it nobly rose to crown the hill above Rye scarcely a stone of its facings had been repaired, or a mouldering brick withdrawn. It possessed, even in the material of its fashioning, some inexplicable immortality, even as did the fortunes of its owners. Its mellowing had but marked their enrichment and stability; their stability rivalled that of the steadfast house. The sun, in these long days of June, had not yet quite set, and the red level rays made the bricks to glow, and gave a semblance as of internal fire to the attested guarantee of the motto. Whoever had builded, he had builded well, and the labour of the bricklayers was not lost.

A couple of years ago Colin, still at Eton, had concocted a mad freak with Violet. There had been a fancy-dress ball in the house, at which he had been got up to represent his ancestral namesake, as shewn in the famous Holbein. There the first Colin appeared as a young man of twenty-five, but the painter had given him the smooth beauty of boyhood, and his descendant, in those rich embroidered clothes, might have passed for the very original and model for the portrait.

This, then, had been their mad freak: Violet, appearing originally in the costume of old Colin’s bride, had slipped away to her room, when the ball was at its height, and changed clothes with her cousin. She had tucked up her hair under his broad-brimmed jewelled hat, he had be-wigged himself and easily laced his slimness into her stiff brocaded gown, and so indistinguishable were they that the boys, Colin’s friends and contemporaries, had been almost embarrassingly admiring of him, while her friends had found her not less forward. A slip by Colin in the matter of hoarse laughter at an encircling arm and an attempt at a kiss had betrayed him into forgetting his brilliant falsetto and giving the whole thing away.

Not less like to each other now than then, they stood at the entrance of the terraces. He had gained, perhaps, a couple of inches on her in height, but the piled gold of her hair, and his bare feet equalised that. No growth of manhood sheathed the smoothness of his cheeks; they looked like replicas of one type, still almost sexless in the glow of mere youth. Theirs was the full dower of their race, health and prosperity, glee and beauty, and the entire absence of any moral standard.

Faun and nymph, they stood there together, she in the thin blouse and white skirt of her tennis-clothes, he in the mere towel of his bathing. He had but thrown it on anyhow, without thought except to cover himself, and yet the folds of it fell from his low square shoulders with a plastic perfection. A hand buried in it held it round his waist, tightly outlining the springing of his thighs from his body. With her, too, even the full tennis-skirt, broad at the hem for purposes of activity, could not conceal the exquisite grace of her figure; above, the blouse revealed the modelling of her arms and the scarcely perceptible swell of her breasts. High-bred and delicate were they in the inimitable grace of their youth; what need had such physical perfection for any dower of the spirit?

She filled her eyes with the glow of the sunlit front, and then turned to him. “Colin, it’s a crime,” she said, “that you aren’t in Raymond’s place. I don’t like Raymond, and yet, if you’re right and he means to propose to me, I don’t feel sure that I shall refuse him. It won’t be him I refuse, if I do, it will be Stanier.”

“Lord, I know that!” said Colin. “If I was the elder, you’d marry me to-morrow.”

“Of course I should, and cut out Aunt Hester. And the funny thing, darling, is that we’re neither of us in love with the other. We like each other enormously, but we don’t dote. If you married Aunt Hester I shouldn’t break my heart, nor would you if I married Raymond.”

“Not a bit. But I should think him a devilish lucky fellow!”

She laughed. “So should I,” she said. “In fact, I think him devilish lucky already. Colin, if I do refuse him, it will be because of you.”

“Oh, chuck it, Violet!” said he.

She nodded towards the great stately house. “It’s a big chuck,” she said.

From the far side of the house there came the sound of motor-wheels on the gravel, and after a moment or two the garden door at the centre of the terrace opened, and Raymond came out. He was not more than an inch or so shorter than his brother, but his broad, heavy, short-legged build made him appear short and squat. His eyebrows were thick and black, and already a strong growth of hair fringed his upper lip. While Colin might have passed for a boy of eighteen still, the other would have been taken for a young man of not less than twenty-five. He stood there for a minute, looking straight out over the terrace, and the marsh below. Then, turning his eyes, he saw the others in the dusky entrance through the yew-hedge, and his face lit up. He came towards them.

“I’ve only just come,” he said. “Had a puncture. How are you, Violet?”

“All right. But how late you are! We’re all late, in fact. We must go and dress.”

Raymond looked up and down Colin’s bath-towel, and his face darkened again. But he made a call on his cordiality.

“Hullo, Colin,” he said. “Been bathing? Jolly in the water, I should think.”

“Very jolly,” said Colin. “How long are you down for?”

He had not meant any particular provocation in the question, though he was perfectly careless as to whether Raymond found it there or not. He did, and his face flushed.

“Well, to be quite candid,” he said, “I’m down here for as long as I please. With your permission, of course.”

“How jolly!” said Colin in a perfectly smooth voice, which he knew exasperated his brother. “Come on, Vi, it’s time to dress.”

“Oh, there’s twenty minutes yet,” said Raymond. “Come for a few minutes’ stroll, Vi.”

Colin paused for her answer, slightly smiling, and looking just above Raymond’s head. The two always quarrelled whenever they met, though perhaps “quarrel” is both too strong and too superficial a word to connote the smouldering enmity which existed between them, and which the presence of the other was sufficient to wreathe with little flapping flames. Envy, as black as hell and as deep as the sea, existed between them, and there was no breath too light to blow it into incandescence. Raymond envied Colin for absolutely all that Colin was, for his skin and his slimness, his eyes and his hair, and to a degree unutterably greater, for the winning smile, the light, ingratiating manner that he himself so miserably lacked, even for a certain brusque heedlessness on Colin’s part which was interpreted, in his case, into the mere unselfconsciousness of youth. In the desire to please others, Raymond held himself to be at least the equal of his brother, yet, where his efforts earned for him but a tepid respect, Colin would weave an enchantment. If Raymond made some humorous contribution to the conversation, glazed eyes and perfunctory comment would be all his wages, whereas if Colin, eager and careless, had made precisely the same offering, he would have been awarded attention and laughter.

Colin, on the other hand, envied his brother not for anything he was, but for everything he had. Theirs was no superficial antagonism; the graces of address and person are no subjects for light envy, nor yet the sceptred fist of regal possessions. That fist was Raymond’s; all would be his; even Violet, perhaps, Stanier certainly, would be.

At this moment the antagonism flowered over Violet’s reply. Would she go for a stroll with Raymond or wouldn’t she? Colin cared not a blade of grass which she actually did; it was her choice that would feed his hatred of his brother or make him chuckle over his discomfiture. For an infinitesimal moment he diverted his gaze from just over Raymond’s head to where, a tiny angle away, her eyes were level with his. He shook his head ever so slightly; some drop of water perhaps had lodged itself from his diving in his ear.

“Oh, we shall all be late,” said she, “and Uncle Philip hates our being late. Only twenty minutes, did you say? I must rush. Hair, you know.”

She scudded off along the paved terrace without one glance behind her.

“Want a stroll, Raymond?” said Colin. “I haven’t got to undress, only to dress. I needn’t go for five minutes yet.”

Raymond had seen the headshake and Colin’s subsequent application of the palm of a hand to his ear was a transparent device. Colin, he made sure, meant him to see that just as certainly as he meant Violet to do so. The success of it enraged him, and not less the knowledge that it was meant to enrage him. Colin’s hand so skilfully, so carelessly, laid these traps which silkenly gripped him. He could only snarl when he was caught, and even to snarl was to give himself away.

“Oh, thanks very much,” he said, determined not to snarl, “but, after all, Vi’s right. Father hates us being late. How is he? I haven’t seen him yet.”

“Ever so cheerful,” said Colin. “Does he know you are coming, by the way?”

“Not unless Vi has told him. I telephoned to her.”

“Pleasant surprise,” said Colin. “Well, if you don’t want to stroll, I think I’ll go in. Vi’s delighted that you’ve come.”

Once again Raymond’s eye lit up. “Is she?” he asked.

“Didn’t you think so?” said Colin, standing first on one foot and then on the other, as he slipped on his tennis shoes to walk across the paving of the terrace.

There had been no break since the days of Colin’s grandfather in the solemnity of the ceremonial that preceded dinner. Now, as then, the guests, if there were any, or, if not, the rest of the family, were still magnificently warned of the approach of the great hour, and, assembling in the long gallery which adjoined the dining-room, waited for the advent of Lord Yardley.

That piece of ritual was like the Canon of the Mass, invariable and significant. It crystallised the centuries of the past into the present; dinner was the function of the day, dull it might be, but central and canonical, and the centre of it all was the entrance of the head of the family. He would not appear till all were ready; his presence made completion, and the Staniers moved forward by order. So when the major-domo had respectfully enfolded the flock in the long gallery, he took his stand by the door into the dining-room. That was the signal to Lord Yardley’s valet who waited by the door at the other end of the gallery which led into his master’s rooms. He threw that open, and from it, punctual as the cuckoo in the clock, out came Lord Yardley, and every one stood up.

But in the present reign there had been a slight alteration in the minor ritual of the assembling, for Colin was almost invariably late, and the edict had gone forth, while he was but yet fifteen, and newly promoted to a seat at dinner, that Master Colin was not to be waited for: the major-domo must regard his jewelled flock as complete without him. He, with a “Sorry, father,” took his vacant place when he was ready, and his father’s grim face would soften into a smile. Raymond’s unpunctuality was a different matter, and he had amended this weakness.

To-night there were no guests, and when the major-domo took his stand at the dining-room door to fling it open on the remote entry of Lord Yardley from the far end of the gallery, all the family but Colin were assembled. Lord Yardley’s mother, now over eighty, white and watchful and bloodless, had been as usual the first to arrive, and, leaning on her stick, had gone to her chair by the fireplace, in which, upright and silent, she waited during these canonical moments. She always came to dinner, though not appearing at other meals, for she breakfasted and lunched in her own rooms, where all day, except for a drive in the morning, she remained invisible. Now she held up her white hand to shield her face from the fire, for whatever the heat of the evening, there was a smouldering log there for incense.

Ronald Stanier sat opposite her, heavy and baggy-eyed, breathing sherry into the evening paper. His wife, the querulous Janet, was giving half an ear to Raymond’s account of his puncture, and inwardly marvelling at Lady Hester’s toilet. Undeterred by the weight of her sixty years, she had an early-Victorian frock of pink satin, high in the waist and of ample skirt. On her undulated wig of pale golden hair, the colour and lustre of which had not suffered any change of dimness since the day when she ran away with her handsome young husband, she wore a wreath of artificial flowers; a collar of pearls encircled her throat which was still smooth and soft. The dark eyebrows, highly arched, gave her an expression of whimsical amusement, and bore out the twinkle in her blue eyes and the little upward curve at the corner of her mouth. She was quite conscious of her sister-in-law’s censorious gaze; poor Janet had always looked like a moulting hen....

By her stood Violet, who had but this moment hurried in, and whose entrance was the signal for Lord Yardley’s valet to open the door. She had heard Colin splashing in his bath as she came along the passage, though he had just bathed.

Then, with a simultaneous uprising, everybody stood, old Lady Yardley leaned on her stick, Ronald put down the evening paper, and Raymond broke off the interesting history of his punctured wheel.

Philip Yardley went straight to his mother’s chair, and gave her his arm. In the dusk, Raymond standing between him and the window was but a silhouette against the luminous sky. His father did not yet know that he had arrived, and mistook him for his brother.

“Colin, what do you mean by being in time for dinner?” he said. “Most irregular.”

“It’s I, father,” said Raymond.

“Oh, Raymond, is it?” said Lord Yardley. “I didn’t know you were here. Glad to see you.”

The words were sufficiently cordial, but the tone was very unlike that in which he had supposed himself to be addressing Colin. That was not lost on Raymond; for envy, the most elementary of all human passions, is also highly sensitive.

“You came from Cambridge?” asked his father, when they had sat down, in the same tone of studious politeness. “The term’s over, I suppose.”

“Yes, a week ago,” said Raymond. As he spoke he made some awkward movement in the unfolding of his napkin, and upset a glass which crashed on to the floor. Lord Yardley found himself thinking, “Clumsy brute!”

“Of course; Colin’s been here a week now,” he said, and Raymond did not miss that. Then Philip Yardley, considering that he had given his son an adequate welcome, said no more.

These family dinners were not, especially in Colin’s absence and in Raymond’s presence, very talkative affairs. Old Lady Yardley seldom spoke at all, but sat watching first one face and then another, as if with secret conjectures. Ronald Stanier paid little attention to anything except to his plate and his glass, and it was usually left to Violet and Lady Hester to carry on such conversation as there was. But even they required the stimulus of Colin, and to-night the subdued blink of spoons on silver-gilt soup-plates reigned uninterrupted. These had just ceased when Colin appeared, like a lamp brought into a dusky room.

“Sorry, father,” he said. “I’m late, you know. Where’s my place? Oh, between Aunt Hester and Violet. Ripping.”

“Urgent private affairs, Colin?” asked his father.

“Yes, terribly urgent. And private. Bath.”

The whole table revived a little, as when the gardener waters a drooping bed of flowers.

“But you had only just bathed,” said Violet.

“That’s just why I wanted a bath. Nothing makes you so messy and sticky as a bathe. And there were bits of grass between my toes, and a small fragment of worm.”

“And how did they get there, dear?” asked Aunt Hester, violently interested.

“Because I walked up in bare feet over the grass, Aunt Hester,” said Colin. “It’s good for the nerves. Come and do it after dinner.”

Lord Yardley supposed that Colin had not previously seen his brother, and that seeing him now did not care to notice his presence. So, with the same chill desire to be fair in all ways to Raymond, he said:

“Raymond has come, Colin.”

“Yes, father, we’ve already embraced,” said he. “Golly, I don’t call that soup. It’s muck. Hullo, granny dear, I haven’t seen you all day. Good morning.”

Lady Yardley’s face relaxed; there came on her lips some wraith of a smile. Colin’s grace and charm of trivial prattle was the only ray that had power at all to thaw the ancient frost that had so long congealed her. Ever since her husband’s death, twenty years ago, she had lived some half of the year here, and now she seldom stirred from Stanier, waiting for the end. Her life had really ceased within a few years of her marriage; she had become then the dignified lay-figure, emotionless and impersonal, typical of the wives of Staniers, and that was all that her children knew of her. For them the frost had never thawed, nor had she, even for a moment, lost its cold composure, even when on the night that the news of Raymond’s and Colin’s birth had come to Stanier, there came with it the summons that caused her husband to crash among the glasses on the table. Nothing and nobody except Colin had ever given brightness to her orbit, where, like some dead moon, she revolved in the cold inter-stellar space.

But at the boy’s salutation across the table, she smiled. “My dear, what an odd time to say good morning,” she said. “Have you had a nice day, Colin?”

“Oh, ripping, grandmamma!” said he. “Enjoyed every minute of it.”

“That’s good. It’s a great waste of time not to enjoy....” Her glance shifted from him to Lady Hester. “Hester, dear, what a strange gown,” she said.

“It’s Aunt Hester’s go-away gown after her marriage,” began Colin. “She....”

“Colin,” said his father sharply, “you’re letting your tongue run away with you.”