He professed no interest in the manufacture of netting, and he spent a great proportion of his spare time engaged in sports which held no lure for his cousins at all. At Cambridge he had got his Blue for Rugger, a circumstance which seemed right and commendable (though strangely un-Kane-like) to Silas and Clement. But when he continued to play Rugger on Saturday afternoons, after he had come down from Cambridge, the cousins shook their heads and were afraid that he would never settle down. They thought it a great pity, for they were fond of Jim. Clement said he had a very sound brain if only he could be brought to take life seriously; and Silas, watching in astonishment Jim's handling of a speedboat, feared that the poor boy had taken after his mother. He disapproved of the speedboat as profoundly as he disapproved of the flighty-looking sports car, but, all the same, he let Jim keep it in his boathouse at the bottom of the cliff and, little as he understood the lure of such sports, derived a queer pleasure from recounting his young cousin's exploits to such people as Joe Mansell, whose nephews and cousins achieved no speed records and broke no limbs at Twickenham.

Since young Mr. Harte, upon her right, was fully occupied with the consumption of ice pudding, and Clive Pemble, on her left, had become involved in the intricacies of his wife's anecdote, Miss Allison had leisure to observe the last of the Kanes. Having decided some months previously that it was no part of a companion-secretary's duties to fall in love with any member of her employer's family, she had assured herself that she was wholly impervious to Mr. James Kane's charm of manner and made up her mind to demonstrate clearly to him her utter unconcern. Unfortunately he seemed to be insensitive to snubs, and, in spite of having received from her a very cold greeting upon his arrival at Cliff House, he had had the audacity to try to catch her eye three times during the course of dinner. She was happy to think that upon each occasion she had managed to avoid his gaze.