CHAPTER III.

ARTHUR CRAVEN AND HIS FRIEND.

LIEUTENANT-COLONEL ARTHUR CRAVEN had been getting rather weary of his prolonged talk with Mrs. Bygrave, but as he had been asked to stay to luncheon, and luncheon would certainly bring the young daughter of the house, he stayed patiently. Nothing would have astonished Ida more than to hear that Colonel Craven's frequent visits were in any way connected with her. He had come to Sandford about a month before, and was staying with Mr. Garnett, an ex-Bengal civilian, and Mrs. Bygrave's only brother, at the Postern House about a mile out of the town. The Garnett household consisted of father and three daughters, of whom the youngest was a little Ida's senior. Mr. Garnett had been twentyfive years in India, and had left it for good on coming into the family property,—a

small estate lying west of Sandford, with a quaint old fashioned manor-house, known from time immemorial as "the Postern." It was never very clearly proved what was the origin of the name, but there was a floating tradition, in which all the children at any rate believed very firmly, that from the old Norman castle, which stood in the heart of the town, there ran a subterranean passage under the town and fields, down below the river, which had its issue in the garden of the Postern House. Certainly under the castle keep there was a vault, ending in a passage, dark, damp, and unwholesome, to the end of which the most daring of the children had never ventured; the air was foul, and before their bits of candle were burnt out, the young nerves had had enough of it; and as certainly in the Postern garden, there was a passage mouth, hidden in a hawthorn thicket, blocked up with stones and rubbish.

Mr. Garnett had come to live at the old place, in the earlier days of his sister's widow

hood; and the house had been at first some little outlet for her weariness at her anxious

wearing surroundings. But she had never liked her sister-in-law, and a worse difference than usual between the two ladies had given a final impulse to Mrs. Bygrave when she was contemplating flight. Mrs. Garnett was now dead, and the intercourse between the two houses was of the most friendly description.

Mr. Garnett had left India, anticipating perfect happiness on getting out of that "detestable country," and had talked much of what he would do in the way of managing the place; but in truth the place did not need much managing, and Mr. Garnett had lost all the country tastes he had ever had. He fancied, too, that he hated London, to make matters worse, so lived on in the country in a chronic state of discontent.

Indian field-sports had spoilt him for the few partridges in his corn-fields; long days and years of steady work had utterly spoilt

him for believing in busy idleness; farming was about equally vexatious and unprofitable; the county society in which Mrs. Bygrave delighted bored him most intensely; there were far too many women, and they talked too much; the men were scarcely to be seen, and talked too little, or at best discussed the crops and the weather; if by good fortune they got to talk politics, it was soon found that the squires were one and all old-fashioned tories, while Mr. Garnett, as an Anglo-Indian, was of course a liberal, with the odd despotic dash that makes Anglo-Indian liberalism such a very uncertain quantity.

The only time he was at all happy, was when he could persuade some old Indian friend to come and share his idleness. This was not very difficult, for men at home from India on furlough, in search of change and rest, were often glad enough to spend some time in what was after all a pleasant house.

So there was very often an Anglo-Indian idler at the Postern. The better set, the

real workers of Indian life, of whom by the way Colonel Craven was one, were less easy to get. They had for the most part some form of real employment for their time of holiday; thus Mr. Garnett thought himself the more lucky in catching Arthur Craven, whom he had known first as a subaltern at Delhi, and afterwards as a military civilian in the Cis-Sutlej States after the first Sikh war, and he secretly wondered, much as the fact rejoiced him, what could possibly keep Craven in "this hole."

Arthur Craven was the younger son of an old west country family, who had been sent to India at sixteen, and thought very little about before or since by his own people. He had been educated up to that time at a school near Exeter, and on a direct cadetship being offered to his father for him, he had then been sent adrift with his commission in the Bengal Native Infantry and £500 at a Calcutta agent's to buy him horse and He had been a thorough country boy

tent.