WHAT FLOCKART FORESAW The following afternoon was glaring and breathless.

Gabrielle had taken Stokes, with May Spencer (a girl friend visiting her mother), and driven the "sixteen" over to Connachan with a message from her mother--an invitation to Lady Murie and her party to luncheon and tennis on the following day.

It was three o'clock, the hour when silence is upon a summer house-party in the country.

Beneath the blazing sun Glencardine lay amid its rose-gardens, its cut beech-hedges, and its bowers of greenery.

The palpitating heat was terrible--the hottest day that summer.
At the end of the long, handsome drawing-room, with its pale blue carpet and silk-covered furniture, Lady Heyburn was lolling lazily in her chair near the wide, bright steel grate, with her inseparable friend, James Flockart, standing before her.
The striped blinds outside the three long, open windows subdued the sun-glare, yet the very odour of the cut flowers in the room seemed oppressive, while without could be heard the busy hum of insect life.
The Baronet's handsome wife looked cool and comfortable in her gown of white embroidered muslin, her head thrown back upon the silken cushion, and her eyes raised to those of the man, who was idly smoking a cigarette, at her side.
"The thing grows more and more inexplicable," he was saying to her in a low, strained voice.