Sidney began to laugh.
"Uncle Ted is bowled over. I'm to go down in the early hours of to-morrow, and she's to feed here till she gets in comfortably. It's all arranged."
"I think I'll stroll round and have a look at her," said Austin. "If I'm a connection, I ought to have first innings."
"Ask your mother about her first," said Sidney.
"Oh, you suspicious, conventional brutes!"
The Major shot this out with vehemence; then walked out of the room, and banged the door behind him.
Sidney could not treat it gravely.
"Dad," she said, "this is worse than we have had hitherto. Uncle Ted is always susceptible, but he never has capitulated quite so rapidly."
"Don't chaff him. You'll make his kind-heartedness into something more if you don't look-out!"
Sidney took her father's rebuke at once, and said no more; but the next morning a groom rode down before breakfast with a note from Mrs. de Cressiers: