Sir Cresswell Oliver rose, glanced at Audrey and her mother, received some telepathic communication from them, and assumed his old quarter-deck manner.
"Not tonight, I think, Petherton," he said authoritatively.
"No—certainly not tonight!"
* * * * *
Some months later, when Audrey Greyle had come into possession of Scarhaven, and had married Copplestone in the little church behind her mother's cottage, she and her husband, to satisfy a mutual and long-cherished desire, visited a certain romantic and retired part of the country. And in the course of their wanderings they came across a very pretty village, and in it a charmingly situated retreat, which looked so attractive from the road along which they were walking that they halted and peered at it through its trimly-kept boundary hedge. And there, seated in the easiest of chairs on the smoothest of lawns, roses about him, a cigar in his mouth, the newspaper in his hand, a glass at his elbow, they saw Peter Chatfield. They looked at him for a long moment; then they looked at each other and smiled delightedly, as children might smile at a pleasure-giving picture, and they passed on in silence. But when that village lay behind them, Copplestone gave his wife a sly glance, and permitted himself to make an epigram.
"Chatfield!" he said musingly. "Chatfield! sublimely ungrateful that he isn't in Dartmoor."