The Yellow Streak

"Oh, Robin, Robin, dear!" she sobbed--incomprehensibly, for she was a woman.

CHAPTER II

AT TWILIGHT

There is a delicious snugness, a charming lack of formality, about the ceremony of afternoon tea in an English country-house--it is much too indefinite a rite to dignify it by the name of meal--which makes it the most pleasant reunion of the day. For English country-house parties consist, for the most part, of a succession of meals to which the guests flock the more congenially as, in the interval, they have contrived to avoid one another's companionship.

And so, scarcely had the last reverberation of Bude's measured gonging died away than the French window leading from the lounge-hall on to the terrace was pushed open and two of Hartley Parrish's guests emerged from the falling darkness without into the pleasant comfort of the firelit room.

They were an oddly matched pair. The one was a tubby little man with short bristly grey