of the ‘Rulers of India’ series—­Sir Somebody Something, K.C.S.I.  My unconscionable humbug of a parent probably wants to get something approaching a fact out of him.  Daddy’s writing a thing for one of the reviews on the elective principle for India this week.  He says he’s the only writer on Indian subjects who isn’t disqualified by ever having been there, and is consequently quite free of prejudice.”

“Ah!” said Elfrida, “how banal! I thought you said there would be something real here—­somebody in whose garment’s hem there would be virtue.”

“And I suggest the dress-coat of the historian of the Semitic nations!” Janet laughed.  “Well, if nearly all our poets are dead and our novelists in the colonies, I can’t help it, can I!  Here is Mr. Kendal, at all events.”

Kendal came up, with his perfect manners, and immediately it seemed to Elfrida that their little group became distinct from the rest, more important, more worthy of observation.  Kendal never added anything to the unities of their conversation when he joined these two; he seemed rather to break up what they had to say to each other and attract it to himself.  He always gave an accent to the life and energy of their talk; but he made them both self-conscious and watchful—­seemed to put them, as it were, upon their guard against one another, in a way which Janet found vaguely distressing.  It was invariably as if Kendal turned their intercourse into a joust by his mere presence as spectator; as if—­Janet put it plainly to herself, reddening—­they mutely asked him to bestow the wreath on one of them.  She almost made up her mind to ask Elfrida where their understanding went to when John Kendal came up, but she had not found it possible yet.  There was an embarrassing chance that Elfrida did not feel their change of attitude, which would entail nameless surmises.

“You ought to be at work,” Janet said severely to Kendal, “back at Barbizon or in the fields somewhere.  It won’t be always June.”

“Ah, would you banish him!” Elfrida exclaimed daintily.  “Surely Hyde Park is rustic enough—­in June.”

Kendal smiled into her face.  “It combines all the charm of the country,” he began.

“And the chic of the town,” Elfrida finished for him gaily.  “I know—­I’ve seen the Boot Show.”

“Extremely frivolous,” Janet commented.

“Ah, now we are condemned!” Elfrida answered, and for an instant it almost seemed as if it were so.

“Daddy wants you to go and paint straggling gray stone villages in Scotland now—­straggling, climbing gray stone villages with only a bit of blue at the end of the ’Dead Wynd’ where it turns into the churchyard gate.”

“How charming!” Elfrida exclaimed.

“I suppose he has been saturating himself with Barrie,” Kendal said.  “If I could reproduce Barrie on canvas, I’d go, like a shot.  By the way, Miss Bell, there’s somebody you are, interested in—­do you see a middle-aged man, rather bald, thick-set, coming this way?—­George Jasper.”