This event had occurred three years previously, within a month of the glorious victory at Waterloo, and quite unexpectedly, of a fatal stroke. It had been a shock to his children, but not a grief. “In fact,” said Venetia, scandalizing kind Lady Denny, “we go on very much better without him.”

“My dear!” gasped her ladyship, who had come to the Manor prepared to clasp the orphans to her sentimental bosom. “You are overwrought!”

“Indeed I’m not!” Venetia replied, laughing. “Why, ma’am, how many times have you declared him to have been the most unnatural parent?”

“But he’s dead, Venetia!”

“Yes, but I don’t suppose he has any more fondness for us now than he had when he was alive, ma’am. He never made the least push to engage our affections, you know, so he really cannot expect us to grieve for him.”

Finding this unanswerable Lady Denny merely begged her not to say such things, and made haste to ask what she now meant to do. Venetia had said that it all depended on Conway. Until he came home to take up his inheritance there was nothing she could do but continue in the old way. “Except, of course, that I shall now be able to entertain our friends at the Manor, which will be very much more comfortable than it was when Papa would allow none but Edward Yardley and Dr. Bentworth to cross the threshold.”

Three years later Venetia was still awaiting Conway’s return, and Lady Denny had almost ceased to inveigh against his selfishness in leaving the burden of his affairs on her shoulders. No one had been surprised that he had at first found it impossible to return to England, for no doubt everything must have been at sixes and sevens in Belgium and France, and all our regiments sadly depleted after so sanguinary a battle as Waterloo. But as the months slid by, and all the news that was to be had of Conway came in a brief scrawl to his sister assuring her that he had every confidence in her ability to do just as she ought at Undershaw, and would write to her again when he had more time to devote to the task, it began to be generally felt that his continued absence arose less from a sense of duty than from reluctance to abandon a life that seemed (from accounts gleaned from visitors to the Army of Occupation) to consist largely of cricket-matches and balls.