"I hope he will," muttered Kaimes, devoutly. "For if Frith comes along we shan't get a shillin'!"
"I'm half afraid we shan't get one now," sighed Lady Jim. "Here's the avenue. What a charming place!"
"I'd let it out on buildin' leases, if I had it," remarked the prosaic Jim, "an' cut the timber. Lot of money in those trees."
"Don't look into jewellers' windows, Jim. You're not rich enough to buy the stock."
"Rich! It was as much as I could do to scrape enough together for our tickets."
"Ah, well," said Leah, reassuringly, as the wheels scrunched the frozen snow before the great porch, "we needn't spend anything here, except half a crown for the plate."
"Catch me wastin' money in that way," snapped Kaimes, swinging himself out to help his wife to alight. "Halloa, here's old Colley, lookin' like a dean as usual;" and Jim, again assuming his hearty manner and jovial leer, shook hands with the butler, whom he had known since Etonian days.
The house-party was composed of hostile elements; consequently, every one was compelled to adopt a forced air of Christmas peace and good-will, which rather tried jumpy nerves. The Duke dug up fossilised cousins to participate in the festive season, and these did not suit with some fashionable folk, who for various reasons, as they put it, "had to be nice to the dear old Duke." Mr. Jaffray and his poetic sister of fifty, who quarrelled incessantly, hardly suited the tastes of Mrs. Penworthy, as a daughter of the horse-leech and intensely up-to-date. Nor did Graham, the Little England politician, enjoy the company of Lord Sargon, a Tory, and a believer in the divine right of the last legal descendant of the Stuarts. Also, the various young women and men, who were really nobodies, and fancied themselves somebodies, found the parts they were expected to take in an old-fashioned Christmas rather a bore.
"The season of peace and good-will," explained the Duke, after dinner, when this collection of smartness and do wellness embellished the great drawing-room. "We must all love one another."
The company assented conventionally, and every one smiled violently on every one, to the amusement of Lady Canvey. "If this was the Palace of Truth," she announced, "there would be trouble."