For his part, Lord Fairholme gave no further thought to Marigny. It did not even occur to him it might be advisable to call again at the College Green Hotel, since Medenham had slept elsewhere, and Hereford was now the goal. Certainly, the Frenchman’s good fairy might have pushed her good offices to excess by permitting him to see, careering about Bristol with a pair of chauffeurs, the man whom he believed to be then on the way to London. But fairies are unreliable creatures, apt to be off with a hop, skip, and a jump, and, in any case, Marigny was writing explicit instructions to Devar, though he would have been far more profitably employed in lounging outside the hotel.
So everybody was dissatisfied, more or less, the quaking Dale more, perhaps, than any, and the person who had absolutely no shadow of care on his soul was Medenham himself, at that moment guiding the Mercury along the splendid highway that connects Bristol with Gloucester—taking the run leisurely, too, lest Cynthia should miss one fleeting glimpse of the ever-changing beauties of the Severn estuary.
During one of these adagio movements by the engine, Cynthia, who had been consulting a guidebook, leaned forward with a smile on her face.
“What is a lamprey?” she asked.
“A special variety of eel which has a habit of sticking to stones by its mouth,” said Medenham. Then he added, after a pause: “Henry the First was sixty-seven years of age when he died, so the dish of lampreys was perhaps blamed unjustly.”
“You have a good memory,” she retorted.
“Oh, is that in your book, Miss Vanrenen? Well, here is another fact about Gloucester. Alfred the Great held a Witenagemot there in 896. Do you know what a Witenagemot is?”
“Yes,” she said, “a smoking concert.”
Mrs. Devar invariably resented these bits of by-play, since she could no more extract their meaning than if they were uttered in Choctaw.
“Some very good people live in Gloucestershire,” she put in. “There are the——” She began to give extracts from Burke’s “Landed Gentry,” whereupon the speedometer index sprang to forty-five, and a noble fifteenth century tower soon lifted its stone lacework above the trees and spires of the ancient city.