"Did he speak of his purpose in doing so?"
"On the contrary, he was singularly taciturn. All that I could gather from him was that he was returning to fulfill some purpose which he had kept before him for a great many years."
The Marquis sighed. On his high, shapely forehead could be traced the lines of a regretful frown.
"I was sure of it," he groaned. "The fellow is returning to make himself a nuisance to me. He did not tell you his story, then, Mr. Thain?"
"He showed no inclination to do so—in fact he avoided so far as possible all discussion of his past."
"Richard Vont," the Marquis continued, raising his eyes to the ceiling, "was one of those sturdy, thick-headed, unintelligent yeomen who have been spoiled by the trifle of education doled out to their grandfathers, their fathers and themselves. A few hundred years ago they formed excellent retainers to the nobles under whose patronage they lived. To-day, in these hideously degenerate days, Mr. Thain, when half the world has moved forward and half stood still, they are an anachronism. They find no seemly place in modern life."
David Thain sat very still. There was just a little flash in his eyes, which came and went as sunlight might have gleamed across naked steel.
"But I must not forget," his host went on tolerantly, "that I am speaking now to one who must to some extent have lost his sense of social proportion by a prolonged sojourn in a country where life is more or less a jumble."
"You refer to America?"
"Naturally! As a country resembling more than anything a gigantic sausage machine wherein all races and men of all social status are broken up on the wheel, puffed up with false ideas, and thrown out upon the world, a newly fledged, cunning, but singularly ignorant race of individuals, America possesses great interest to those—to those, in short," the Marquis declared, with a little wave of the hand, "whom such things interest. I am English, my forefathers were Saxon, my instincts are perhaps feudal. That is why I regard the case of Richard Vont from a point of view which you might possibly fail to appreciate. Would it bore you if I continue?"