For more than a week Mrs. Wingfield had noted the approach of that cloud of _ennui_ which she had always dreaded when she had thought of him as entering upon a career of pottering. She had made several suggestions to him with a view to its dispersal before it settled down upon him. She thought of the hounds--might it not be possible for him to take the hounds? Was the present master not tired of them yet? And then she thought of the pheasants--the pheasants had never been properly looked after, she knew, though she was quite unaware of how handy the gamekeeper's wife at the lodge had found their eggs when she had to make an omelette in a hurry.
Only when she had thought of these ways of anchoring a man to the county, the bower anchor of the hounds and the kedge anchor of the pheasant, did she think of the third way--The Girl. She had been thinking a great deal about the girl during the previous week; and already she was wondering if she might not pencil in some dates in her diary for mothers with nice--really nice, girls--they were getting scarcer and scarcer, she thought--to pay a visit to the Manor and so give Providence a chance of doing something for her son and incidentally for the girl: for would she not be a fortunate girl who should attract the attention of so eligible a man?
She had dreams of cosy house parties; and now, instead of making herself familiar with the stores of wisdom in the magazines on the table beside her, she was looking wistfully out from the terrace across the lawn to the water garden with its old stonework and its shrubberies and its many fascinating and secluded nooks. How happy she would be if she could but see her boy emerge from one of those romantic places with a charming roseate girl--if he would lead that girl to her side with a word or two to ask her to welcome a daughter!
And it was just when such a picture was presenting itself to her that the postbag arrived and was brought to her by a footman. She unlocked it, and found within half-a-dozen letters for herself, a large number of the inevitable tradesmen's circulars, offering coal at the lowest summer prices and a fine choice of grates in which to consume it. She threw them to one side; but she did not so treat the two long envelopes with evidently bulky enclosures which remained among the contents of the mail. One had its origin printed right across it--"The East Indian Steam Ship Company"; the other was floridly embossed with a tropical scene, and the strap that enclosed it was stamped "The Madagascar Direct Route." A sort of guide-book pamphlet entitled "Try Patagonia" had also come, addressed to her son, and a small volume purporting to be on "Tarpon, and How to Catch Them."