Luncheon at 94 Grosvenor Square was an exceedingly simple meal. FRONTISPIECE. [See page 92].

THE WICKED MARQUIS

BY

E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
WILL GREFÉ

MCCLELLAND & STEWART PUBLISHERS
TORONTO

Copyright, 1919,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
All rights reserved

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[ Luncheon at Grosvenor Square was an exceedingly simple meal . . . Frontispiece ]

[ "Richard Vont was head-keeper at Mandeleys when I succeeded to the title and estates" ]

[ "I expect we are all as bad, though," she went on rather gloomily, "even if we are not quite so blatant" ]

[ "You're very hard, father," she said simply ]

THE WICKED MARQUIS

CHAPTER I

Reginald Philip Graham Thursford, Baron Travers, Marquis of Mandeleys, issued, one May morning, from the gloomy precincts of the Law Courts without haste, yet with certain evidences of a definite desire to leave the place behind him. He crossed first the pavement and then the street, piloted here and there by his somewhat obsequious companion, and turned along the Strand, westwards. Then, in that democratic thoroughfare, for the first time since the calamity had happened, his lips were unlocked in somewhat singular fashion.

"Well, I'm damned!" he exclaimed, with slow and significant emphasis.

His companion glanced up furtively in his direction. The Marquis, as Marquises should be, was very tall and slim, with high well-shaped nose, very little flesh upon his face, a mouth of uncertain shape and eyes of uncertain colour. His companion, as solicitors to the aristocracy should be, was of a smaller, more rotund and insignificant shape. He had the healthy complexion, however, of the week-end golfer, and he affected a certain unlegal rakishness of attire, much in vogue amongst members of his profession having connections in high circles. In his heart he very much admired the ease and naturalness with which his patron, in the heart of professional London, strode along by his side in a well-worn tweed suit, a collar of somewhat ancient design, and a tie which had seen better days.

"The judge's decision was, without doubt, calamitous," he confessed gloomily.

The Marquis turned in at the Savoy courtyard with the air of an habitué.

"I am in need of a brief rest and some refreshment," he said. "You will accompany me, if you please, Mr. Wadham."

The lawyer acquiesced and felt somehow that he had become the tail end of a procession, the Marquis's entrance and progress through the grillroom towards the smoking-room bar was marked by much deference on the part of porters, cloak-room attendants and waiters, a deference acknowledged in the barest possible fashion, yet in a manner which his satellite decided to make a study of. They reached a retired corner of the smoking room, where the Marquis subsided into the only vacant easy chair, ordered for himself a glass of dry sherry, and left his companion to select his own refreshment and pay for both.

"What," the former enquired, "is the next step?"

"There is, alas!" Mr. Wadham replied, "no next step."

"Exactly what do you mean by that?" the Marquis demanded, knitting his brows slightly as he sipped his sherry.

"We have reached the end," the lawyer pronounced. "The decision given by the Court to-day is final."

The Marquis set down his glass. The thing was absurd!

"Surely," he suggested, "the House of Lords remains?"

"Without a doubt, your lordship," Mr. Wadham assented, "but it is of no use to us in the present instance. The judge of the Supreme Court—this is, by-the-by, our third appeal—has delivered a final decision."

The Marquis seemed vaguely puzzled.

"The House of Lords," he persisted, "remains surely a Court of Appeal for members of my order whose claims to consideration are not always fully recognised in the democracy of the common law court."

"I fear," Mr. Wadham replied, with a little cough, "that the House of Lords is supposed to have other functions."

"Other functions?"

"In an indirect sort of fashion," Mr. Wadham continued, "it is supposed to assist in the government of the country."

"God bless my soul!" the Marquis exclaimed.

There was a queer, intangible silence. The lawyer was quite aware that a storm was brewing, but as his distinguished client never lost his temper or showed annoyance in any of the ordinary plebeian ways, he was conscious of some curiosity as to what might happen next.

"You mean to say, then," the Marquis continued, "that for the rest of my days, and in the days of those who may succeed me, that edifice, that cottage which for generations has sheltered one of the family retainers, is to remain the property of—of an alien?"

"I fear that that is the decision of the court," the lawyer admitted. "The deed of gift was exceptionally binding."

The Marquis shook his head. The thing was incomprehensible.

"I can stand upon the roof of Mandeleys," he said, "and I can look north, south, east and west, and in no direction can I look off my own land. Yet you mean to tell me that almost in my garden there is to remain a demesne which can be occupied by any Tom, Dick or Harry which its nominal owner chooses to place in possession?"

The lawyer signed to the waiter for their glasses to be replenished.

"It is certainly not justice, your lordship," he admitted,—"it is not even reasonable—but it is the law."

The Marquis produced a gold cigarette case, absently lit a cigarette, and returned the case to his pocket without offering it to his companion. He smoked meditatively and sipped his second glass of sherry.

"A state of things," he declared, "has been revealed to me which I cannot at present grasp. I must discuss the matter with Robert—with my son-in-law, Sir Robert Lees. He is an intensely modern person, and he may be able to suggest something."

"Sir Robert is a very clever man," the lawyer acknowledged, "but failing an arrangement with the tenant himself, I cannot see that there is anything further to be done. We have, in short, exhausted the law."

"A process," the Marquis observed sympathetically, "which I fear that you must have found expensive, Mr. Wadham."

"The various suits into which we have entered on behalf of your lordship, and the costs which we have had to pay," the latter hastened to announce, "amount, I regret to say, to something over eighteen thousand pounds."

"Dear me!" his companion sighed. "It seems quite a great deal of money."

"Since we are upon the subject," the lawyer proceeded, "my firm has suggested that I should approach your lordship with regard to some means of—pardon me—reducing the liability in question."

So far as the face of Mr. Wadham's client was capable of expressing anything, it expressed now a certain amount of surprise.

"It appears to me, Mr. Wadham," he remarked, "that you are asking me to attend to your business for you."

The lawyer knitted his brows in puzzled fashion.

"I am not sure that I quite follow your lordship," he murmured.

"Do I employ you," his patron continued, "to manage my estates, to control my finances, to act as agent to all my properties, and yet need to keep a perspective myself of my various assets? If eighteen thousand pounds is required, it is for your firm to decide from what quarter the money should come. Personally, as you know, I never interfere."

Mr. Wadham coughed in somewhat embarrassed fashion.

"As a matter of fact, your lordship," he confessed, with a most illogical sense that it was his duty to apologise for his client's impecuniosity, "as a matter of fact, neither my partners nor I can at the present moment see where a sum of eighteen thousand pounds can be raised."

The Marquis rose to his feet and shook the cigarette ash carefully from his coat.

"Our conversation, Mr. Wadham," he said, "is reaching a stage which bores me. I have just remembered, too," he added, with a glance at the clock, "that my daughter is entertaining a few friends to lunch. You must write to Merridrew. He is really a most excellent agent. He will tell you what balances are likely to be available during the next few months."

Mr. Wadham received the suggestion without enthusiasm.

"We made an application to Mr. Merridrew some few weeks ago," he remarked, "as we needed some ready money for the purpose of briefing the barristers. Mr. Merridrew's reply was not encouraging."

"Ah!" the Marquis murmured. "Merridrew is a gloomy dog sometimes. Try him again. It is astonishing how elastic he can be if he is squeezed."

"I am afraid your lordship has done all the squeezing," the solicitor observed ruefully.

A little trill of feminine laughter rang through the room. Two smartly attired young ladies were seated upon a divan near the door, surrounded by a little group of acquaintances. One of them leaned forward and nodded as the Marquis and his companion passed.

"How do you do, Marquis?" she said, in distinctly transatlantic accents.

The behaviour of his client, under such circumstances, remained an object lesson to Mr. Wadham for the rest of his life. The Marquis gazed with the faintest expression of surprise at, or perhaps through, the young person who had addressed him. Fumbling for a moment in his waistcoat pocket, he raised a horn-rimmed monocle to his eye, dropped it almost at once, and passed on without the flicker of an eyelid. On their way to the outside door, however, he shook his head gravely.

"What a singular exhibition," he murmured,—"demonstration, perhaps I should say—of the crudeness of modern social intercourse! Was it my fancy, Wadham, or did the young person up there address me?"

"She certainly did," the other assented. "She even called you by name."

They were standing in the courtyard now, waiting for a taxi, and the Marquis sighed.

"In a public place, too!" he murmured. "Wadham, I am afraid that we are living in the wrong age. I came to that conclusion only a few days ago, when I was invited, actually invited, to dine at the house of— But I forget, Wadham, I forget. Your grandfather would appreciate these things. You yourself are somewhat imbued, I fear, with the modern taint. A handful of silver, if you please," he added, holding out his hand. "I am not accustomed to these chance conveyances."

The lawyer searched his trousers pockets, and produced a couple of pink notes and a few half-crowns. In some mysterious fashion, the whole seemed to pass into the Marquis's long, aristocratic hand. He turned to the porter who was standing bare-headed, and slipped a ten-shilling note into his palm.

"Well, good morning, Wadham," he said, stepping into his taxicab. "I have no doubt that you did your best, but this morning's unfortunate happening will take me some time to get over. My compliments to your senior partner. You can say that I am disappointed—no more."

The Marquis crossed his legs and leaned back in the vehicle. Mr. Wadham remained upon the pavement, gazing for a moment at his empty hand.

"Taxi, sir?" the hall porter asked obsequiously.

Mr. Wadham felt in all his pockets.

"Thank you," he replied gloomily, "I'll walk."

CHAPTER II

Lady Letitia Thursford, the only unmarried daughter of the Marquis, stood in a corner of the spacious drawing-room at 94 Grosvenor Square, talking to her brother-in-law. Sir Robert, although he wanted his luncheon very badly and, owing to some mistake, had come a quarter of an hour too soon, retained his customary good nature. He always enjoyed talking to his favourite relation-in-law.

"I say, Letty," he remarked, screwing his eyeglass into his eye and looking around, "you're getting pretty shabby here, eh?"

Lady Letitia smiled composedly.

"That is the worst of you nouveaux riches," she declared. "You do not appreciate the harmonising influence of the hand of Time. This isn't shabbiness, it's tone."

"Nouveaux riches, indeed!" he repeated. "Better not let your father hear you call me names!"

"Father wouldn't care a bit," she replied. "As for this drawing-room, Robert, well, sixty years ago it must have been hideous. To-day I rather like it. It is absolutely and entirely Victorian, even to the smell."

Sir Robert sniffed vigorously.

"I follow you," he agreed. "Old lavender perfume, ottomans, high-backed chairs, chintzes that look as though they came out of the ark, and a few mouldy daguerreotypes. The whole thing's here, all right."

"Perhaps it's just as well for us that it is," she observed. "I have come to the conclusion that furniture people are the least trustful in the world. I don't think even dad could get a van-load of furniture on credit."

Sir Robert nodded sympathetically. He was a pleasant-looking man, a little under middle age, with bright, alert expression, black hair and moustache, and perhaps a little too perfectly dressed. He just escaped being called dapper.

"Chucking a bit more away in the Law Courts, isn't he?"

Letitia indulged in a little grimace.

"Not even you could make him see reason about that," she sighed. "He is certain to lose his case, and it must be costing him thousands."

"Dashed annoying thing," Sir Robert remarked meditatively, "to have a cottage within a hundred yards of your hall door which belongs to some one else."

"It is annoying, of course," Letitia assented, "but there is no doubt whatever that Uncle Christopher made it over to the Vonts absolutely, and I don't see how we could possibly upset the deed of gift. I am now," she continued, moving towards a stand of geraniums and beginning to snip off some dead leaves, "about to conclude the picture. You behold the maiden of bygone days who condescended sometimes to make herself useful."

The scissors snipped energetically, and Sir Robert watched his sister-in-law. She was inclined to be tall, remarkably graceful in a fashion of her own, a little pale, with masses of brown hair, and eyes which defied any sort of colour analysis. But what Sir Robert chiefly loved about her were the two little lines of humour at the corners of her firm, womanly mouth.

"Yes, you're in the setting all right, Letty," he declared, "and yet you are rather puzzling. Just now you look as though you only wanted the crinoline and the little curls to be some one's grandmother in her youth. Yet at that picture show the other night you were quite the most modern thing there."

"It's just how I'm feeling," she confided, with a little sigh, standing back and surveying her handiwork. "I have that rare gift, you know, Robert, of governing my personality from inside. When I am in this room, I feel Victorian, and I am Victorian. When I hear that Russian man's music which is driving every one crazy just now—well, I feel and I suppose I look different. Here's Meg coming. How well she looks!"

They watched the motor-car draw up outside, and the little business of Lady Margaret Lees's descent carried out in quite the best fashion. A footman stood at the door, a grey-haired butler in plain clothes adventured as far as the bottom step; behind there was just the suggestion of something in livery.

"Yes, Meg's all right," Sir Robert replied. "Jolly good wife she is, too. Why don't you marry, Letty?"

"Perhaps," she laughed, leaning a little towards him, "because I did not go to a certain house party at Raynham Court, three years ago."

"Are you conceited enough," he inquired, "to imagine that I should have chosen you instead of Meg, if you had been there?"

"Perhaps I should have been a little too young," she admitted. "Why haven't you a brother, Robert?"

"I don't believe you'd have married him, if I had," he answered bluntly. "I'm not really your sort, you know."

Lady Margaret swept in, very voluble but a little discursive.

"Isn't this just like Bob!" she exclaimed. "I believe he always comes here early on purpose to find you alone, Letty! Who's coming to lunch, please? And where's dad?"

"Father should be on his way home from the Law Courts by now," Letitia replied, "and I am afraid it's a very dull luncheon for you, Meg. Aunt Caroline is coming, and an American man she travelled over on the steamer with. I am not quite sure whether she expects to let Bayfield to him or offer him to me as a husband, but I am sure she has designs."

"The Duchess is always so helpful," Robert grunted.

"So long as it costs her nothing," Lady Margaret declared, "nothing makes her so happy as to put the whole world to rights."

"Here she comes—in a taxicab, too," Sir Robert announced, looking out of the window. "She is getting positively penurious."

"She is probably showing off before the American," Lady Margaret remarked. "She is always talking about living in a semi-detached house and making her own clothes. Up to the present, though, she has stuck to Worth."

The Duchess, who duly arrived a few moments later, brought with her into the room a different and essentially a more cosmopolitan atmosphere. She was a tall, fair woman, attractive in an odd sort of way, with large features, a delightful smile, and a habit of rapid speech. She exchanged hasty greetings with every one present and then turned back towards the man who had followed her into the room.

"Letty dear, this is Mr. David Thain—Lady Letitia Thursford. I told you about Mr. Thain, dear, didn't I? This is almost his first visit to England, and I want every one to be nice to him. Mr. Thain, this is my other niece, Lady Margaret Lees, and her husband, Sir Robert Lees. Where's Reginald?"

"Father will be here directly," Letitia replied. "If any one's famished, we can commence lunch."

"Then let us commence, by all means," the Duchess suggested. "I have been giving the whole of the morning to Mr. Thain, improving his mind and showing him things. We wound up with the shops—although I am sure Alfred's tradespeople are no use to any one."

Letitia moved a few steps towards the bell, and on her way back she encountered the somewhat earnest gaze of her aunt's protégé. Even in those few moments since his entrance, she had been conscious of a somewhat different atmosphere in the faded but stately room. He had the air of appraising everything yet belonging nowhere, of being wholly out of touch with an environment which he could scarcely be expected to understand or appreciate. He was not noticeably ill-at-ease. On the other hand, his deportment was too rigid for naturalness, and she was conscious of some quality in his rather too steadfast scrutiny of herself which militated strongly against her usual toleration. He seemed to stand for events, and in the lives which they mostly lived, events were ignored.

The butler opened the door and announced luncheon. They crossed the very handsome, if somewhat empty hall, into the sombre, mahogany-furnished dining room, the walls of which were closely hung with oil paintings. Letitia motioned the stranger to sit at her right hand, and fancied that he seemed a little relieved at this brief escape from his cicerone. Having gone so far, however, she ignored him for several moments whilst she watched the seating of her other guests. Her brother-in-law she drew to the vacant place on her left.

"I dare say father will lunch at the club," she whispered. "Aunt Caroline always ruffles him."

"I am afraid he will have found something down Temple Bar way to ruffle him a great deal more this morning," Sir Robert replied.

The door of the dining room was at that moment thrown open, however, and the Marquis entered. Pausing for a moment on the threshold, in line with a long row of dingy portraits, there was something distinctly striking in the family likeness so mercilessly reproduced in his long face, with the somewhat high cheek bones, his tall, angular figure, the easy bearing and gracious smile. One missed the snuffbox from between his fingers, and the uniform, but there was yet something curiously unmodern in the appearance of this last representative of the Mandeleys.

"Let no one disturb themselves, pray," he begged. "I am a little late. My dear Caroline, I am delighted to see you," he went on, raising his sister's fingers to his lips. "Margaret, I shall make no enquiries about your health! You are looking wonderfully well to-day."

The Duchess glanced towards her protégé, who had risen to his feet and stood facing his newly arrived host. There was a moment's poignant silence. The two men, for some reason or other, seemed to regard each other with no common interest.

"This is my friend, Mr. David Thain," the Duchess announced,—"my brother, the Marquis of Mandeleys. Mr. Thain is an American, Reginald."

The Marquis shook hands with his guest, a form of welcome in which he seldom indulged.

"Any friend of yours, Caroline," he said quietly, "is very welcome to my house. Robert," he added, as he took his seat, "they tell me that you were talking rubbish about agriculture in the House last night. Why do you talk about agriculture? You know nothing about it. You are not even, so far as I remember, a landed proprietor."

Sir Robert smiled.

"And therefore, sir, I am unprejudiced."

"No one can talk about land, nowadays, without being prejudiced," his father-in-law rejoined.

"Father," Letitia begged, "do tell us about the case."

The Marquis watched the whiskey and soda with which his glass was being filled.

"The case, my dear," he acknowledged, "has, I am sorry to say, gone against me. A remarkably ill-informed and unattractive looking person, whom they tell me will presently be Lord Chief Justice, presumed not only to give a decision which was in itself quite absurd, but also refused leave to appeal."

"Sorry to hear that, sir," Sir Robert remarked. "Cost you a lot of money, too, I'm afraid."

"I believe that it has been an expensive case," the Marquis admitted. "My lawyer seemed very depressed about it."

"And you mean to say that it's really all over and done with now?" Lady Margaret enquired.

"For the present, it certainly seems so," the Marquis replied. "I cannot believe, personally, that the laws of my country afford me no relief, under the peculiar circumstances of the case. According to Mr. Wadham, however, they do not."

"What is it all about, anyway, Reginald?" his sister asked. "I have heard more than once but I have forgotten. Whenever I look in the paper for a divorce case, I nearly always see your name against the King, or the King against you, with a person named Vont also interested. Surely the Vont family have been retainers down at Mandeleys for generations? I remember one of them perfectly well."

The Marquis cleared his throat.

"The unfortunate circumstances," he said, "are perhaps little known even amongst the members of my own family. Perhaps it will suffice if I say that, owing to an indiscretion of my uncle and predecessor, the eleventh Marquis, a gamekeeper's cottage and small plot of land, curiously situated in the shadow of Mandeleys, became the property of a yeoman of the name of Vont. This ill-advised and singular action of my late uncle is complicated by the fact that the inheritors of his bounty have become, as a family, inimical to their patrons. Their present representative, for instance, is obsessed by some real or fancied grievance upon which I scarcely care to dilate. For nearly twenty years," the Marquis continued ruminatively, "the cottage has been empty except for the presence of an elderly person who died some years ago. Since then I have, through my lawyers, endeavoured, both by purchase and by upsetting the deed of gift, to regain possession of the property. The legal owner appears to be domiciled in America, and as he has been able to resist my lawsuits and has refused all my offers of purchase, I gather that in that democratic country he has amassed a certain measure of wealth. We are now confronted with the fact that this person announces his intention of returning to England and taking up his residence within a few yards of my front door."

Sir Robert laughed heartily.

"Upon my word, sir," he exclaimed, "it's a humorous situation!"

The Marquis was unruffled but bitter.

"Your sense of humour, my dear Robert," he said, "suffers, I fear, from your daily associations in the House of Commons."

The man by Letitia's side suddenly leaned forward. After the smooth and pleasant voice of the Marquis, his question, with its slight transatlantic accent, sounded almost harsh.

"What did you say that man's name was, Marquis?"

"Richard Vont," was the courteous reply. "The name is a singular one, but America is a vast country. I imagine it is scarcely possible that in the course of your travels you have come across a person so named?"

"A man calling himself Richard Vont crossed in the steamer with me, three weeks ago," David Thain announced. "I have not the least doubt that this is the man who is coming to occupy the cottage you speak of."

"It is indeed a small world," the Marquis remarked. "I will not inflict this family matter upon you all any longer. After lunch, perhaps, you will spare me a few moments of your time, Mr.—Mr. Thain. I shall be interested to hear more about this person."

Letitia rose, presently, to leave the room. Whilst she waited for her aunt to conclude a little anecdote, she glanced with some interest at the man by her side. More than ever the sense of his incongruity with that atmosphere seemed borne in upon her, yet she was forced to concede to him, notwithstanding the delicacy of his appearance, a certain unexpected strength, a forcefulness of tone and manner, which gave him a certain distinction. He had risen, waiting for her passing, and one lean brown hand gripped the back of the chair in which she had been sitting. She carried away with her into the Victorian drawing-room, with its odour of faded lavender, a queer sense of having been brought into momentary association with stronger and more vital things in life.

CHAPTER III

Sir Robert preferred to join his wife and sister-in-law in the drawing-room after luncheon. The Marquis, with a courteous word of invitation, led his remaining guest across the grey stone hall into the library beyond—a sparsely furnished and yet imposing looking apartment, with its great tiers of books and austere book cases. On his way, he drew attention carelessly to one or two paintings by old masters, and pointed out a remarkable statue presented by a famous Italian sculptor to his great-grandfather and now counted amongst the world's treasures. His guest watched and observed in silence. There was nothing of the uncouth sight-seer about him, still less of the fulsome dilettante. They settled themselves in comfortable chairs in a pleasant corner of the apartment.

A footman served them with coffee, a second man handed cigars, and the butler himself carried a tray of liqueurs. The Marquis assumed an attitude of complete satisfaction with the world in general.

"I am pleased to have this opportunity of a few words with you, Mr. Thain," he said. "You are quite comfortable in that chair, I trust?"

"Perfectly, thank you."

"And my Larangas are not too mild? You will find darker-coloured cigars in the cabinet by your side."

"Thank you," David Thain replied, "I smoke only mild tobacco."

"Personally," the Marquis sighed, "I can go no further than cigarettes. A vice, perhaps," he added, watching the blue smoke curl upwards, "but a fascinating one. So you came across this man Vont on the steamer. Might I ask under what circumstances?"

"Richard Vont, as I think he called himself," was the quiet reply, "shared a cabin in the second class with my servant. I was over there once or twice and talked with him."

"That is very interesting," the Marquis observed. "He travelled second class, eh? And yet the man has many thousands to throw away in these absurd lawsuits with me."

"He may have money," Thain pointed out, "and yet feel more at home in the second class. I understood that he had been a gamekeeper in England and was returning to his old home."

"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?"

"Not in the least," David Thain assured him.

"Richard Vont was head-keeper at Mandeleys when I succeeded to the title and estates, an advent which occurred a few years after my wife's death. He was already occupying a peculiar position there, owing to the generosity of my predecessor, whose life he had had the good fortune to save. He had very foolishly married above him in station—the girl was a school mistress, I believe. When I came to Mandeleys, I found him living there, a widower with one daughter, and a little boy, his nephew. The girl inherited her mother's superiority of station and intellect, and was naturally unhappy. I noticed her with interest, and she responded. Consequences which in the days of our ancestors, Mr. Thain, would have been esteemed an honour to the persons concerned, ensued. Richard Vont, like an ignorant clodhopper, viewed the matter from the wrong standpoint.... You said something, I believe? Pardon me. I sometimes fancy that I am a little deaf in my left ear."

"Richard Vont was head-keeper at Mandeleys when I succeeded to the title and estates."

The Marquis leaned forward but David Thain shook his head. His lips had moved indeed, but no word had issued from them.

"So far," his host went on, "the story contains no novel features. I exercised what my ancestors, in whose spirit I may say that I live, would have claimed as an undoubted right. Richard Vont, as I have said, with his inheritance of ill-bestowed education, and a measure of that extraordinary socialistic poison which seems, during the last few generations, to have settled like an epidemic in the systems of the agricultural classes, resented my action. His behaviour became so intolerable that I was forced to dismiss him from my service, and finally, to avoid a continuance of melodramatic scenes, which were extremely unpleasant to every one concerned, I was obliged to leave England for a time and travel upon the Continent."

"And, in the meantime, what happened at Mandeleys?" David Thain asked.

"Richard Vont and his nephew appear to have left for the United States very soon after my own departure from England. The cottage he left in the care of an elderly relative, who gave little trouble but much annoyance. She attended a Primitive Methodist Chapel in the village, and she passed both myself and the ladies of my household at all times without obeisance."

"Dear me!" David Thain murmured under his breath.

"After her death, I instructed my lawyers to examine the legal title to the Vont property and to see whether there was any chance of regaining it. Its value would be, at the outside, say six or seven hundred pounds. I advertised and offered two thousand, five hundred pounds to regain, it. My solicitors came into touch with the man Vont through an agent in America. His reply to their propositions on my behalf does not bear repetition. I then instructed my lawyers to take such steps as they could to have the deed of gift set aside, sufficient compensation of course being promised. That must have been some eight years ago. My efforts have come to an end to-day. The cottage remains the property of Richard Vont. My own law costs have been considerable, but by some means or other this man Vont has contrived to defend his property at the expenditure of some five or six thousand pounds. One can only conclude that he must have prospered in this strange country of yours, Mr. Thain."

"To a stranger," the latter observed, "it seems curious that this man should have set so high a value upon a property which must be full of painful associations to him."

"The very arguments I made use of in our earlier correspondence," his host assented. "I have told you the story, Mr. Thain, because it occurred to me that this man might have communicated to you his reason for returning after all these years to the neighbourhood."

"He told me nothing."

"Then I have wasted your time with a long and, I fear, a very dull story," the Marquis apologised gracefully. "Shall we join the others?"

"There was just one question, if I might be permitted," David Thain said, "which I should like to ask concerning the story which you have told me. The girl to whom you have alluded—Vont's daughter—what became of her?"

The Marquis for a moment stood perfectly still. He had just risen to his feet and was standing where a gleam of sunlight fell upon his cold and passionless features. His silence had, in its way, a curious effect. He seemed neither to be thinking nor hesitating. He was just in a state of suspense. Presently he leaned forward and knocked the ash from his cigarette into the grate.

"The lady in question," he replied, "has found that place in the world to which her gifts and charm entitle her. I fear that my sister will be getting impatient. My daughter, too, I am sure, would like to improve her acquaintance with you, Mr. Thain."

David Thain was, in his way, an obstinate and self-willed man, but he found himself, for those first few moments, subject to his host's calm but effectual closure of the conversation. Nevertheless, he recovered himself in time to ask that other question as they left the room.

"The lady is alive, then?"

"She is alive," the Marquis acquiesced, in a colourless tone.

A servant threw open the door of the drawing-room. The Marquis motioned to his guest to precede him.

"As I imagined," he murmured, "I see that my sister is impatient. You will forgive me, Caroline," he went on, turning to the Duchess. "Mr. Thain's conversation was most interesting. Letitia, my dear, do press Mr. Thain to dine with us one evening. This afternoon I fear that I have been unduly loquacious. I should welcome another opportunity of conversing with him concerning his wonderful country."

Letitia picked up a little morocco-bound volume from the table and consulted it. Sir Robert drew the prospective guest a little on one side.

"For heaven's sake," he whispered, "don't give the Marquis any financial tips. He has a fancy that he is destined to restore the fortunes of the Mandeleys on the Stock Exchange. He is a delightfully ornamental person, but I can assure you that as a father-in-law he is a distinct luxury."

David Thain smiled grimly.

"I shall be careful," he promised.

CHAPTER IV

The Marquis devoted the remainder of that afternoon, as he did most others, to paying a call. Very soon indeed after David Thain's departure, he left the house, stepped into the motor-car which was waiting for him, and, with a little nod to the chauffeur which indicated his indulgence in a customary enterprise, drove off towards Battersea. Here he descended before a large block of flats overlooking the gardens, stepped into the lift and, without any direction to the porter, was let out upon the sixth floor. He made his way along the corridor to a little mahogany front door, on which was a brass plate inscribed with the name of Miss Marcia Hannaway. He rang the bell and was at once admitted by a very trim parlourmaid, who took his hat and cane, and ushered him into a remarkably pleasant little sitting room. A woman, seated before a typewriter, held out two ink-stained hands towards him with a little laugh.

"I've been putting a ribbon in," she confessed. "Did you ever see such a mess! Please make yourself comfortable while I go and wash."

The Marquis glanced with a slight frown at the machine, and, taking her wrists, stooped down and kissed them lightly.

"My dear Marcia," he expostulated, "is this necessary!"

She shook her head with a droll smile.

"Perhaps if it were," she confessed, "I should hate to do it. There's a Nineteenth Century on the sofa. You can read my article."

She hurried out of the room, from which she was absent only a very few moments. The Marquis, with a finger between the pages of the review which he had been reading, looked up as she re-entered. She was a woman of nameless gifts, of pleasant if not unduly slim figure. Her forehead was perhaps a little low, her eyes brilliant and intelligent, her mouth large and exceedingly mobile. She was not above the allurements of dress, for her house gown, with its long tunic trimmed with light fur, was of fashionable cut and becoming. Her fingers, cleansed now from the violet stains, were shapely, almost elegant. She threw herself into an easy chair opposite her visitor, and reached out her hand for a cigarette.

"Well," she asked, "and how has the great trial ended?"

"Adversely," the Marquis confessed.

"You foolish person," she sighed, lighting the cigarette and throwing the match away. "Of course you were bound to lose, and I suppose it's cost you no end of money."

"I believe," he admitted, a little stiffly, "that my lawyers are somewhat depressed at the amount."

She smoked in silence for a moment.

"So he will go back to Mandeleys. It is a queer little fragment of life. What on earth does he want to do it for?"

"Obstinacy," the Marquis declared,—"sheer, brutal, ignorant obstinacy."

"And the boy?" she asked, pursuing her own train of thought. "Have you heard anything of him?"

"Nothing. To tell you the truth, I have made no enquiries. Beyond the fact that it seems as though, for the present, Richard Vont will have his way, I take no interest in either of them."

She nodded thoughtfully.

"If only we others," she sighed, "could infuse into our lives something of the marvellous persistence of these people whom in other respects we have left so far behind!"

"My dear Marcia," he protested, "surely, with your remarkable intelligence, you can see that such persistence is merely a form of narrow-mindedness. Your father has shut in his life and driven it along one narrow groove. To you every day brings its fresh sensation, its fresh object. Hence—coupled, of course, with your natural gifts—your success. The person who thinks of but one thing in life must be indeed a dull dog."

"Very excellent reasoning," she admitted. "Still, to come back to this little tragedy—for it is a tragedy, isn't it?—have you any idea what he means to do when he gets to Mandeleys?"

"None at all!"

"Let me see," she went on, "it is nineteen years ago last September, isn't it?—nineteen years out of the middle of his life. Will he sit in the garden and brood, I wonder, or has he brought back with him some scheme of mediaeval revenge?"

"There was a time," the Marquis reflected, "when several of my Irish tenants used to shoot at me every Saturday night from behind a hedge. It was not in the least a dangerous operation, and I presume it brought them some relief. With Vont, however, things would be different. I remember him distinctly as a most wonderful shot."

"Psychologically," Marcia Hannaway observed, "his present action is interesting. If he had shot you or me in his first fit of passionate resentment, everything would have been in order, but to leave the country, nurse a sullen feeling of revenge for years, and then come back, seems curious. What shall you do when you see him sitting in his garden?"

"I shall address him," the Marquis replied. "I fear that his long residence in such a country as America will have altered him considerably, but it is of course possible that the instincts of his class remain."

"How feudal you are!" she laughed.

The Marquis frowned slightly. Although this was the one person in the world whom he felt was necessary to him, who held a distinct place in his very inaccessible heart, there were times when he entertained a dim suspicion that she was making fun of him. At such times he was very angry indeed.

"In any case," he said, "we will not waste our time in speculating upon this man's attitude. I am still hoping that I may be able to devise means to render his occupancy of the cottage impossible."

"I should like to hear about the boy."

"If," the Marquis promised, "I find Vont's attitude respectful, I will make enquiries."

"When are you going to Mandeleys?" she asked.

"I am in no hurry to leave London," he replied.

"When you go," she told him, "I have made up my mind to take a little holiday. I thought even of going to the South of France."

The lines of her companion's forehead were slightly elevated.

"My dear Marcia," he protested gently, "is that like you? The class of people who frequent the Riviera at this time of the year—"

She laughed at him delightfully.

"Oh, you foolish person!" she interrupted. "If I go, I shall go to a tiny little boarding house, or take a villa in one of the quiet places—San Raphael, perhaps, or one of those little forgotten spots between Hyères and Cannes. Phillis Grant would go with me. She isn't going to act again until the autumn season."

Her visitor's expression was a little blank.

"In the case of your departure from London," he announced, in a very even but very forlorn tone, "I will instruct Mr. Wadham to make a suitable addition to your allowance. At the same time, Marcia," he added, "I shall miss you."

His words were evidently a surprise to her. She threw away her cigarette and came and sat on the sofa by his side.

"Do you know, I believe you would," she murmured, resting her hand upon his. "How queer!"

"I have never concealed my affection for you, have I?" he asked.

This time the laugh which broke from her lips was scarcely natural.

"Concealed your affection, Reginald!" she repeated. "How strangely that sounds! But listen. You said something just now about my allowance. If I allude to it in return, will you believe that it is entirely for your sake?"

"Of course!"

She rose from her chair and, crossing the room, rummaged about her desk for a moment, produced a letter, and brought it to him. The Marquis adjusted his horn-rimmed eyeglass and read:

Dear Madam:

We feel that some explanation is due to you with regard to the non-payment for the last two quarters of your allowance from our client, the Marquis of Mandeleys. We have to inform you that for some time past we have had no funds in our possession to pay this allowance. We informed his lordship of the fact, some time back, but in our opinion his lordship scarcely took the circumstance seriously. We think it better, therefore, that you should communicate with him on the subject.

Faithfully yours,
WADHAM, SON AND DICKSON.

The Marquis deliberately folded up the letter, placed his eyeglass in his pocket, and sat looking into the fire. There was very little change in his face. Only Marcia, to whom he had been the study of a lifetime, knew that so far as suffering was possible to him, he was suffering at that moment.

"You mustn't think it matters," she said gently. "You know my last novel was quite a wonderful success, and for that article in the Nineteenth you were looking at, they gave me twenty guineas. I am really almost opulent. Still, I thought it was better for you to know this. The same thing might refer to other and more important matters, and you know, dear, you are rather inclined to walk with your head in the air where money matters are concerned."

"You have been very considerate, but foolishly so, my dear Marcia," he declared. "This matter must be put right at once. I fear that a younger element has obtruded itself into the firm of Wadham, an element which scarcely grasps the true position. I will see these people, Marcia."

"You are not to worry about it," she begged softly. "To tell you the truth—"

Marcia was a brave woman, and the moment had come up to which she had been leading for so long, which for many months, even years, had been in her mind. And when it came she faltered. There was something in the superb, immutable poise of the man who bent a little courteously towards her, which checked the words upon her lips.

"It will be no trouble to me, Marcia, to set this little affair right," he assured her. "I am only glad that your circumstances have been such that you have not been inconvenienced. At the same time, is it entirely necessary for you to manipulate that hideous machine yourself?" he enquired, inclining his head towards the typewriter.

"There are times," she confessed, "when I find it better. Of course, I send a great deal of my work out to be typed, but my correspondence grows, and my friends find my handwriting illegible."

"I have never found it difficult," he remarked.

"Well, you've had a good many years to get used to it," she reminded him.

His hand rested for a moment upon her shoulder. He drew her a little towards him. She suddenly laughed, leaned over and kissed him on both cheeks, and jumped up. The trim little parlourmaid was at the door with tea.

"Yes," she went on, "you have learned to read my handwriting, and I have learned how you like your tea. Just one or two more little things like that, and life is made between two people, isn't it? Shall I tell you what I think the most singular thing in the world?" she went on, pausing for a moment in her task. "It is fidelity to purpose—and to people, too, perhaps. In a way there is a quaint sort of distinction about it, and from another point of view it is most horribly constraining."

"I interrupted you this afternoon, I imagine," he observed, "in the construction of some work of fiction."

"Oh, no!" she replied. "What I write isn't fiction. That's why it sells. It's truth, you see, under another garb. But there the fact remains—that I shouldn't know how to make tea for another man in the world, and you wouldn't be able to read the letters of any other woman who wrote as badly as I do."

"The fact," he remarked, "seems to me to be a cause for mutual congratulation."

She stooped down to place a dish of muffins on a heater near the fire, graceful yet as a girl, and as brisk.

"I can't imagine," she declared, "why it is that my sex has acquired the reputation for fidelity. I am sure we crave for experience much more than men."

The Marquis helped himself to a muffin and considered the point. There were many times when Marcia's conversation troubled him. He was by no means an ill-read or unintellectual man, only his studies of literature had been confined to its polished and classical side, the side which deals so much with living and so little with life.

"Are you preparing for a new work of fiction, Marcia," he asked, "or are you developing a fresh standpoint?"

"Dear friend," she declared, lightly and yet with an undernote of earnestness, "how can I tell? I never know what I am going to do in the way of work. I wish I could say the same about life. Now I am going to ask you a great favour. I have to attend a small meeting at my club, at the other end of Piccadilly, at half-past five. Would you take me there?"

"I shall be delighted," he answered, a little stiffly.

She went presently to put on her outdoor clothes. The Marquis was disappointed. He realised how much he had looked forward to that quiet twilight hour, when somehow or other his vanity felt soothed, and that queer weariness which came over him sometimes was banished. He escorted Marcia to the car when she reappeared, however, without complaint.

"I see your name in the papers sometimes, Marcia," he observed as he took his place by her side, "in connection with women's work. Of course, I do not interfere in any way with your energies. I should not, in whatever direction they might chance to lead you. At the same time, I must confess that I have noticed with considerable pleasure that you have never been publicly associated with this movement in favour of Woman's Suffrage."

She nodded.

"I should like a vote myself," she admitted simply, "but when I think of the number of other women who would have to have it, and who don't yet look at life seriously at all, I think we are better as we are. Is it my fancy," she went on, a little abruptly, "or are you really troubled about the return of—of Richard Vont?"

"As usual, Marcia," he said, "you show a somewhat extraordinary perception where I am concerned. I am, as you know, not subject to presentiments, and I have no exact apprehension of what the word fear may mean. At the same time, you are right. I do view the return of this man with a feeling which you, as a novelist, might be able to analyse, but which I, as a layman, unused to fresh sentiments, find puzzling. You remember what a famous Frenchman wrote in his memoirs, suddenly, across one blank page of his journal—'To-day I feel that a great change is coming.'"

She smiled reassuringly.

"Personally," she told him, "I believe that it is just the call of England to a man who lived very near the soil—her heart. I think he wants the smell of spring flowers, the stillness of an English autumn, the winds of February in the woods he was brought up in. It is a form of heart-sickness, you know. I have felt it myself so often. It is scarcely possible that after all these years he is still nursing that bitter hatred of us both."

The car had reached the great building in which Marcia's club was situated. The Marquis handed her out.

"I trust that you are right," he remarked. "You will allow me to leave the car for you?"

She shook her head.

"There are so many women here with whom I want to talk," she said. "I may even stay and dine. And would you mind not coming until Wednesday? To-morrow I must work all day at an article which has to be typed and catch the Wednesday's boat for America."

"Exactly as you wish," he assented.

She waved her hand to him and ran lightly up the steps. The Marquis threw himself back in his car and hesitated. The footman was waiting for an address, and his august master was suddenly conscious that the skies were very grey, that a slight rain was falling, and that there was nowhere very much he wanted to go.

The man waited with immovable face.

"To—the club."

CHAPTER V

Messrs. Wadham, Son and Dickson were not habited in luxury. Theirs was one of those old-fashioned suites of offices in Lincoln's Inn, where the passages are of stone, the doors of painted deal, and a general air of bareness and discomfort prevails. The Marquis, who was a rare visitor, followed the directions of a hand painted upon the wall and found himself in what was termed, an enquiry office. A small boy tore himself away with apparent regret from the study of a pile of documents, and turned a little wearily towards the caller.

"I desire," the Marquis announced, "to see Mr. Wadham, Senior, or to confer at once with any member of the firm who may be disengaged."

The small boy was hugely impressed. He glanced at the long row of black boxes along the wall and a premonition of the truth began to dawn upon him.

"What name, sir?" he enquired.

"The Marquis of Mandeleys."

The office boy swung open a wicket gate and pointed to the hard remains of a horsehair stuffed easy-chair. The Marquis eyed it curiously—and remained standing. His messenger thereupon departed, exhibiting a rare and unlegal haste. He returned breathless, in fact, from his mission, closely followed by Mr. Wadham, Junior.

"This is quite an honour, your lordship," the latter said, hastily withdrawing his hand as he became aware of a certain rigidity in his visitor's demeanour. "My father is disengaged. Let me show you the way to his room."

"I should be obliged," the Marquis assented.

Mr. Wadham, Senior, was an excellent replica of his son, a little fatter, a little rosier and a little more verbose. He rose from behind his desk and bowed twice as his distinguished client entered. The Marquis indicated to Mr. Wadham, Junior, the chair upon which he proposed to sit, and waited while it was wheeled up to the side of the desk. Then he withdrew his gloves in leisurely fashion and extended his hand to the older man, who clasped it reverently.

"Your lordship pays us a rare honour," Mr. Wadham, Senior, observed.

"I should have preferred," the Marquis said, with some emphasis, "that circumstances had not rendered my visit to-day necessary."

The head of the firm nodded sympathetically.

"You will bear in mind," he begged, "our advice concerning these recent actions."

"Your advice was, without doubt, legally good," his visitor replied, "but it scarcely took into account circumstances outside the legal point of view. However, I am not here to discuss those actions, which I understand are now finally disposed of."

"Quite finally, I fear, your lordship."

"I find myself," the Marquis continued sternly, "in the painful position of having to prefer a complaint against your firm."

"I am very sorry—very sorry indeed," Mr. Wadham murmured.

"I discovered yesterday afternoon, entirely by accident, that the allowance which you have my instructions to make to Miss Hannaway has not been paid for the last two quarters."

"Through no neglect of ours, I assure your lordship," Mr. Wadham insisted gravely. "You will remember that we wrote to you last October, pointing out that the yield from the estates was insufficient, without the help of the bank, to meet the interest on the mortgages, and that, amongst other claims which we were obliged to leave over, we should be unable to forward the usual cheque to the young lady in question."

The Marquis cleared his throat and tapped with his long forefingers upon the desk. It was a curious circumstance that, although both Mr. Wadham, Senior, and Junior had done more than their duty towards their distinguished client, each had at that moment the feeling of a criminal.

"You are, I believe, perfectly well aware, Mr. Wadham," the Marquis declared, "that I never read your letters."

Mr. Wadham, Senior, coughed. His son thrust both hands into his trousers pockets. The statement was unanswerable.

"I was therefore," the Marquis continued severely, "in complete ignorance of your failure to carry out my instructions."

Mr. Wadham, Junior, less affected than his father by tradition, and priding himself more upon that negligible gift of common sense, interposed respectfully but firmly.

"We can scarcely be responsible," he pointed out, "for your lordship's indisposition to read letters containing business information of importance."

The Marquis changed his position slightly and looked at the speaker. Mr. Wadham, Junior, became during the next few seconds profoundly impressed with the irrelevance, almost the impertinence of his words.

"I should have imagined," the former said severely, "that my habits are well-known to the members of a firm whose connection with my family is almost historical."

"We should have waited upon your lordship," Mr. Wadham, Senior, admitted. "But with reference to the case of this young lady, not hearing from your lordship, we wrote to her, very politely, indicating the great difficulties which we had to face in the management of the Mandeleys estates, owing to the abnormal agricultural depression, and we promised to send her a cheque as soon as such a step became possible. In reply we heard from her—a most ladylike and reasonable letter it was—stating that owing to recent literary successes, and to your lordship's generosity through so many years, she was only too glad of the opportunity to beg us to cease from forwarding the quarterly amount as hitherto. Under those circumstances, we have devoted such small sums of money as have come into our hands to more vital purposes."

"I suppose it did not occur to you," the Marquis observed, "that I am the person to decide what is or is not vital in the disposition of my own moneys."

"That is a fact which we should not presume to dispute," the lawyer admitted, "but I should like to point out that, on the next occasion when we had a little money in hand, your household steward, Mr. Harrison, was here in urgent need of a thousand pounds for the payment of domestic bills connected with the establishment in Grosvenor Square."

"It appears to me," the Marquis said, with a trace of irritability in his tone, "that the greater part of my income goes in paying bills."

The complaint was one which for the moment left Mr. Wadham speechless. He was vaguely conscious that an adequate reply existed, but it eluded him. His son, who had adopted the attitude of being outside the discussion, was engaged in an abortive attempt to appear as much at ease in his own office as this client of theirs certainly was.

"I will discuss the matter of Miss Hannaway's future allowance with that young lady, and let you know the result," the Marquis announced. "In the meantime, how do we stand for ready money?"

"Ready money, your lordship!" his interlocutor gasped.

"Precisely," the Marquis assented. "It is, I believe, a few days after the period when my tenants usually pay their rents."

"Your lordship," Mr. Wadham said, speaking with every attempt at gravity, "if every one of your tenants paid their full rent and brought it into this office at the present moment, we should still be unable to pay the interest on the mortgages due next month, without further advances from the bank."

"These mortgages," the Marquis remarked thoughtfully, "are a nuisance."

So self-evident a fact seemed to leave little room for comment or denial. The Marquis frowned a little more severely and withdrew his forefingers from the desk.

"Figures, I fear, only confuse me," he confessed, "but for the sake of curiosity, what do my quarterly rents amount to?"

"Between seven and eight thousand pounds, according to deductions, your lordship," was the prompt reply. "That sum I presume will be coming in from your agent, Mr. Merridrew, within the course of a few days. The interest upon the mortgages amounts to perhaps a thousand pounds less than that sum. That thousand pounds, I may be permitted to point out to your lordship, is all that remains for the carrying on of your Grosvenor Square establishment, and for such disbursements as are necessary at Mandeleys."

"It is shameful," the Marquis declared severely, "that any one should be allowed to anticipate their income in this way. Mortgages are most vicious institutions."

Mr. Wadham coughed.

"Your lordship's expenditure, some ten or fifteen years ago, rendered them first necessary. After that there was the unfortunate speculation in the tin mines—"

"That will do, Mr. Wadham," his client interrupted. "All I desire to know from you further is a statement of the approximate sum required to clear off the mortgages upon the Mandeleys estates?"

Mr. Wadham, Senior, looked a little startled. His son stopped whistling under his breath and leaned forward in his chair.

"Clear off the mortgages," he repeated.

"Precisely!"

"The exact figures," was the somewhat hesitating pronouncement, "would require a quarter of an hour's study, but I should say that a sum of two hundred and twenty thousand pounds would be required."

"I have not a head for figures," the Marquis acknowledged gravely, "but the amount seems trifling. I shall wish you good-day now, gentlemen. Two hundred and twenty thousand, I think you said, Mr. Wadham?"

"That is as near the amount as possible," the lawyer admitted.

The Marquis drew on his gloves, a sign that he did not intend to honour his adviser with any familiar form of farewell. He inclined his head slightly to Mr. Wadham, and more slightly still to Mr. Wadham, Junior, who was holding open the door. The small boy, who was on the alert, escorted him to the front steps, and received with delight a gracious word of thanks for his attentions. So the Marquis took his departure.

Mr. Wadham, Junior, closed the door and threw himself into the chair which had been occupied by their distinguished client. There was a faint perfume of lavender water remaining in the atmosphere. His eyes wandered around the further rows of tin boxes which encumbered the wall.

"I suppose," he murmured, "it's a great thing to have a Marquis for one's client."

"I suppose it is," Mr. Wadham, Senior, assented gloomily.

"Father, do you ever feel at ease with him?" his son asked curiously. "Do you ever feel as though you were talking to a real human being, of the same flesh and blood as yourself?"

"Never for a single moment," was the vigorous reply. "If I felt like that, John, do you know what I should do? No? Well, then, I'll tell you. I should have those tin boxes taken out, one by one, and stacked in the hall. I should say to him, as plainly as I am saying it to you—'We lose money every year by your business, Marquis. We've had our turn. Try some one else—and go to the Devil!'"

"But you couldn't do it!" Mr. Wadham, Junior, observed disconsolately.

"I couldn't," his father agreed, with a note of subdued melancholy in his tone.

CHAPTER VI

Lady Margaret, who chanced to be the first arrival on the night of the dinner party in David Thain's honour, contemplated her sister admiringly. Letitia was wearing a gown of ivory satin, a form of attire which seemed always to bring with it almost startling reminiscences of her Italian ancestry.

"So glad to find you alone, Letty," she remarked, as she sank into the most comfortable of the easy chairs. "There's something I've been wanting to ask you for weeks. Bob put it into my head again this afternoon."

"What is it, dear?" Letitia enquired.

"Why don't you marry Charlie Grantham?" her sister demanded abruptly.

"There are so many reasons. First of all, he hasn't really ever asked me."

"You're simply indolent," Lady Margaret persisted. "He'd ask you in five minutes if you'd let him. Do you suppose Bob would ever have thought of marrying me, if I hadn't put the idea into his head?"

"You're so much cleverer than I," Letitia sighed.

"Not in the least," was the prompt disclaimer. "I really doubt whether I have your brains, and I certainly haven't your taste. The only thing that I have, and always had, is common sense, common sense enough to see that girls in our position in life must marry, and the sooner the better."

"Why only our class of life?"

"Don't be silly! It's perfectly obvious, isn't it, that the daughters of the middle classes are having the time of their lives. They are all earning money. Amongst them it has become quite the vogue to take situations as secretaries or milliners or that sort of thing, and it simply doesn't matter whether they marry or not. They get all the fun they want out of life."

"It sounds quite attractive," Letitia admitted. "I think I shall take a course in typewriting and shorthand."

"You won't," Margaret rejoined. "You know perfectly well that that is one of the things we can never do. You've got to marry first. Then you can branch out in life in any direction you choose—art, travel, amours, or millinery. You can help yourself with both hands."

"Which have you chosen, Meg?"

"Oh, I am an exception!" Margaret confessed. "You see, Bob is such fun, and I've never got over the joke of marrying him. Besides, I haven't any craving for things at all. I am not temperamental like you. Where's father?"

"Just back from the country. He'll be here in time, though."

"And who's dining?"

"Charlie, for one," Letitia replied, "Aunt Caroline, of course, and Uncle, Mrs. Honeywell, and the American person. The party was got up on his account, so I expect father wants to borrow money from him."

"He doesn't look an easy lender," Lady Margaret remarked.

"There's no one proof against father," Letitia declared. "He is too exquisitely and transparently dishonest. You know, there's a man's story about the clubs that he once borrowed money from Lewis at five per cent. interest."

Margaret remained in a serious frame of mind.

"Something will have to be done," she sighed. "Robert went down and looked at the mortgages, the other day. He says they are simply appalling, there isn't an acre missed out. It's quite on the cards, you know, Letty, that Mandeleys may have to go."

Letitia made a little grimace.

"I am getting perfectly callous," she confided. "If it did, this house would probably follow, father would realise everything he could lay his hands upon and become the autocrat of some French watering place, and I should cease to be the honest but impecunious daughter of a wicked nobleman, and enjoy the liberty of the middle-class young women you were telling me about. It wouldn't be so bad!"

"Or marry—" Margaret began.

"Mr. David Thain," the butler announced.

The juxtaposition of words perhaps incited in Letitia a greater interest as she turned away from her sister to welcome the first of her guests. He had to cross a considerable space of the drawing-room, with its old-fashioned conglomeration of furniture untouched and unrenovated for the last two generations, but he showed not the slightest sign of awkwardness or self-consciousness in any form. He was slight and none too powerfully built, but his body was singularly erect, and he moved with the alert dignity of a man in perfect health and used to gymnastic training. His clean-shaven face disclosed nervous lines which his manner contradicted. His mouth was unexpectedly hard, his deep-set grey eyes steel-like, almost brilliant. These things made for a strength which had in it, however, nothing of the uncouth. The only singularity about his face and manner, as he took his hostess' fingers, was the absence of any smile of greeting upon his lips.

"I am afraid that I am a little early," he apologised.

"We are all the more grateful to you," Lady Margaret assured him. "Letitia and I always bore one another terribly. A married sister, you know, feels rather like the cuckoo returning to the discarded nest."

"One hates other people's liberty so much," Letitia sighed.

"I should have thought liberty was a state very easy to acquire," David Thain observed didactically.

"That is because you come from a land where all the women are clever and the men tolerant," Letitia replied. "Where is that husband of yours, Margaret?"

"I am ashamed to say," her sister confessed, "that he stayed down in the morning room while Gossett fetched him a glass of sherry. Look at him now," she added, as Sir Robert entered the room unannounced and came smiling towards them. "How can I have any faith in a husband like that. Doesn't he look as though the only thing that could trouble him in life was that he hadn't been able to get here a few minutes earlier!"

"Given away, eh?" the newcomer groaned, as he kissed Letitia's fingers. "How are you, Mr. Thain? Your country is entirely to blame for my habits. I got so into the habit of drinking cocktails while I was over there that I really prefer my aperitif to my wine at dinner."

Sir Robert, who had discovered within the last few days exactly where Mr. David Thain stood amongst the list of American multi-millionaires, drew this very distinguished person a little on one side to ask about a railway. Then the Marquis made his appearance, and immediately afterwards the remaining guests. David Thain, of whom many of the morning papers, during the last few days, had found something to say, found himself almost insinuated into the position of favoured guest. He took Mrs. Honeywell—a dark and rather tired-looking lady—in to dinner, but he sat at Letitia's left hand, and she gave him a good deal of her attention.

"You know everybody, don't you, Mr. Thain?" she asked him, soon after they had taken their places.

"Except the gentleman on your right," he answered.

She leaned towards him confidentially.

"His name," she whispered, "is Lord Charles Grantham. He is the son of the Duke of Leicester, who is, between ourselves, almost as wicked a duke as my father is a marquis. Fortunately, however, his mother left him a fortune. Do you notice how thoughtful he looks?"

David Thain glanced across the table at the young man in question, who was exchanging rather weary monosyllables with his right-hand neighbour.

"He is perhaps overworked?"

Letitia shook her head.

"Not at all. He cannot make up his mind whether or not he wants to marry me."

"And can you make up your mind whether you wish to marry him?"

Letitia lost for a moment her air of gentle banter.

"What a downright question!" she observed. "However, I can't tell you before I answer him, can I, and he hasn't asked me yet."

"I should think," David Thain said coolly, "that you would make an excellent match."

Their eyes met for a moment. There was a challenging light in hers to which he instantly responded. Her very beautiful white teeth closed for a moment upon her lower lip. Then she smiled upon him once more.

"It is so reassuring," she murmured, "to be told things like that by people who are likely to know. Charles, talk to me at once," she went on, turning towards him. "Mr. Thain and I agree far too perfectly upon everything."

Thain was deep in conversation with his neighbour before Lord Charles was able to disentangle himself from the conversational artifices of the Duchess. Letitia took note of his aptness with a little, malicious smile. It was towards the close of dinner when she once more turned towards him.

"Have you been telling Mrs. Honeywell how you made all your millions?" she asked.

"I have been trying to point out," he replied, "that the first million is all one has to make. The rest comes."

"What a delightful country!" Letitia observed. "If I were to borrow from all my friends and collected a million, do you think I could go out there and become a multi-millionaire?"

"Women are not natural money-makers," he pronounced.

"What is her real sphere?" she asked sweetly. "I should so much like to know your opinion of us."

"As yet," he replied, "I have had no time to form one."

"What a pity!" she sighed. "It would have been so instructive."

"In the small amenities of daily life," he said thoughtfully, "in what one of our writers calls the insignificant arts, women seem inevitably to excel. They always appear to do better, in fact, in the narrower circles. Directly they step outside, a certain lack of breadth becomes noticeable."

"Dear me!" she murmured. "It's a good thing I'm not one of these modern ladies who stand on a tub in Hyde Park and thump the drum for votes. I should be saying quite disagreeable things to you, Mr. Thain, shouldn't I?"

"You couldn't be one of those, if you tried," he replied. "You see, if I may be permitted to say so, nature has endowed you with rather a rare gift so far as your sex is concerned."

"Don't be over-diffident," she begged. "I may know it, mayn't I?"

"A sense of humour."

"When a man tells a woman that she has a sense of humour," Letitia declared, "it is a sure sign that he—"

She suddenly realised how intensely observant those steely grey eyes could be. She broke off in her sentence. They still held her, however.

"That he what?"

"Such a bad habit of mine," she confided frankly. "I so often begin a sentence and have no idea how to finish it. Ada," she went on, addressing Mrs. Honeywell, "has Mr. Thain taught you how to become a millionairess?"

"I haven't even tried to learn," that lady replied. "He has promised me a subscription to my Cripples' Guild, though."

"What extraordinary bad taste," Letitia remarked, "to cadge from him at dinner time!"

"If your father weren't within hearing," Mrs. Honeywell retorted, "I'd let you know what I think of you as a hostess! Why are we all so frightened of your father, Letitia? Look at him now. He is the most picturesque and kindly object you can imagine, yet I find myself always choosing my phrases, and slipping into a sort of pre-Victorian English, when I fancy that he is listening."

"I see him more from the family point of view, I suppose," Letitia observed, "and yet, in a way, he is rather a wonderful person. For instance, I have never seen him hurry, I have never seen him angry, in the ordinary sense of the word; in fact he has the most amazing complacency I ever knew. Of course, Aunt Caroline," she went on, turning to the Duchess a few moments later, "if you want to stay with the men, pray do so. If not, you might take into account the fact that I have been trying to catch your eye for the last three minutes."

Thain drew up nearer to his host after the women had withdrawn, and found himself next Sir Robert, who talked railways with eloquence and some understanding. Lord Charles was frankly bored, and bestowed his whole attention upon the port. The Marquis discussed a recent land bill with his brother-in-law, but in a very few moments gave the signal to rise. He attached himself at once to David Thain.

"You play bridge?" he asked.

"Never if I can avoid it," was the frank reply.

"Then you and I will entertain one another," his host suggested.

The Marquis's idea of entertainment was to install his guest in a comfortable chair in a small den at the back of the house, which he kept for his absolutely private use, and to broach the subject which had led to David's welcome at Grosvenor Square.

"Let me ask you," he began, "have you seen anything more of this man Vont?"

"Nothing."

The Marquis looked ruminatively at the cedar spill with which he had just lit his cigarette.

"I am almost certain," he said, "that I saw him on the platform at Raynham—the nearest station to Mandeleys—yesterday. He seemed marvellously little altered."

"He has probably taken up his abode down there, then," David observed.

The Marquis's face darkened. He brushed the subject aside.

"There is a matter concerning which I wish to speak to you, Mr. Thain," he said. "You are one of the fortunate ones of the earth, who have attained, by your own efforts, I believe, an immense prosperity."

David listened in silence, watching the ash at the end of his cigar.

"Your money, my son-in-law, Sir Robert, tells me," the Marquis continued, "has been made in brilliant and sagacious speculation. There have no doubt been others who have followed in your footsteps, and, in a humbler way, have shared your success."

David had developed a rare gift of silence. He smoked steadily, and his expression was remarkably stolid.

"I find myself in need of a sum," the Marquis proceeded, with the air of a man introducing a business proposition, "of two hundred and twenty thousand pounds—there or thereabouts."

There was a momentary gleam of interest in David's eyes, gone, however, almost as soon as it had appeared. For the first time he made a remark.

"Over a million dollars, eh?"

The Marquis inclined his head.

"My position," he continued, "naturally precludes me from making use of any of the ordinary methods by means of which men amass wealth. I have at various times, however, made small but not entirely unsuccessful speculations—upon the Stock Exchange. The position in which I now find myself demands something upon a larger scale."

"What capital," David Thain enquired, "can you handle?"

The Marquis stroked his chin thoughtfully. He was aware of a pocketbook a shade fuller than usual, of three overdrawn banking accounts, and his recent interview with his lawyers.

"Capital," he repeated. "Ah! I suppose capital is necessary."

"In any gambling transaction, you always have to take into account the possibility," David reminded him, "that you might lose."

"Precisely," the Marquis assented, selecting another cigarette, "but that is not the class of speculation I am looking for. I am anxious to discover an enterprise, either by means of my own insight into such matters, which is not inconsiderable, or the good offices of a friend, in which the chances of loss do not exist."

David was a little staggered. He contemplated his host curiously.

"Such speculations," he said at last, "are difficult to find."

"Not to a man of your ability, I am sure, Mr. Thain," the Marquis asserted.

"Do I gather that you wish for my advice?"

The Marquis inclined his head.

"That," he intimated, "was my object."

David smoked steadily, and his host contemplated him with a certain artistic satisfaction. He had been something of a sculptor in his youth, and he saw possibilities in the shape and pose of the great financier.

"The long and short of it is," David said at last, "that you want to make a million dollars, without any trouble, and without any chance of loss. There are a good many others, Marquis."

"But they have not all the privilege," was the graceful rejoinder, "of knowing personally a Goliath of finance. You will pardon the allegory. I take it from this morning's Daily Express."

"In my career," David continued, after a moment's pause, "you would perhaps be surprised to hear that I have done very little speculating. I have made great purchases of railways, and land through which railways must run, because I knew my job and because I had insight. The time for that is past now. To make money rapidly one must, as you yourself have already decided, speculate. I can tell you of a speculation in which I have myself indulged, but I do not for a moment pretend that it is a certainty. It was good enough for me to put in two million dollars, and if what I believe happens, my two millions will be forty millions. But there is no certainty."

The Marquis fidgeted in his chair.

"By what means," he asked tentatively, "could I interest myself in this undertaking?"

"By the purchase of shares," was the prompt reply.

The Marquis considered the point. The matter of purchasing anything presented fundamental difficulties to him!

"Tell me about these shares?" he invited. "What is the nature of the undertaking?"

"Oil."

The Marquis grew a little more sanguine. There was an element of fantasy about oil shares. Perhaps they could be bought on paper.

"Large fortunes have been made in oil," he said. "Personally, I am a believer in oil. Where are the wells?"

"In Arizona."

"An excellent locality," the Marquis continued approvingly. "What is the present price of the shares?"

"They are dollar shares," David replied, "and their present price is par. You may find them quoted in some financial papers, but as practically the entire holding is in my possession, the market for them is limited."

"Precisely," the Marquis murmured. "To come to business, Mr. Thain, are you disposed to part with any?"

David appeared to consider the matter.

"Well, I don't know," he said, "I've made something like twenty million dollars out of my railways, and I have about reached that point when speculations cease to attract."

The Marquis held on to the sides of his chair and struggled against the feeling almost of reverence which he feared might be reflected in his countenance.

"A very desirable sum of money, Mr. Thain," he conceded.

"It's enough for me," David acknowledged. "There are two million shares in the Pluto Oil Company, practically the whole of which stand in my name. If the calculations which the most experienced oil men in the States have worked out materialise, those shares will be worth ten million dollars in four months' time. Let me see," he went on, "two hundred and thirty thousand pounds is, roughly speaking, one million, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You can have two hundred thousand of my shares, if you like, at a dollar."

"This is exceedingly kind of you," the Marquis declared. "Let me see," he reflected, "two hundred thousand dollars would be—"

"A matter of forty thousand pounds."

"I see!" the Marquis ruminated. "Forty thousand pounds!"

"You are not, I am sure, a business man," his guest continued, "so you will pardon my reminding you that you can easily obtain an advance from your bankers upon the title deeds of property, or a short mortgage would produce the amount."

"A mortgage," the Marquis repeated, as though the idea were a new one to him. "Ah, yes! I must confess, though, that I have the strongest possible objection to mortgages, if they can in any way be dispensed with."

"I suppose that is how you large English landowners generally feel," David remarked tolerantly. "If you would prefer it, I will take your note of hand for the amount of the shares, payable, say, in three months' time."

The Marquis upset the box of cigarettes which he was handling. He was not as a rule a clumsy person, but he felt strongly the need of some extraneous incident. He stood on the hearthrug whilst the servant whom he summoned collected the cigarettes and replaced them in the box. As soon as the door was closed, he turned to his guest.

"Your offer, Mr. Thain," he said, "is a most kindly one. It simplifies the whole matter exceedingly."

"You had better make the usual enquiries concerning the property," the latter advised. "I am afraid you will find it a little difficult over on this side to get exact information, but if you have any friends who understand oil prospecting—"

The Marquis held out his hand.

"It is not an occasion upon which a further opinion is necessary," he declared. "I approve of the locality of the property, and the fact that you yourself are largely interested is sufficient for me."

"Then any time you like to meet me at your lawyer's," David suggested, "I'll hand over the shares and you can sign a note of hand for the amount."

The Marquis considered the matter for a moment, thoughtfully. There was something about the idea of letting Mr. Wadham see him sign a promissory note for forty thousand pounds which occurred to him as somewhat precarious.

"Perhaps you have legal connections of your own here," he ventured. "To tell you the truth, I have been obliged to speak my mind in a very plain manner to my own solicitors. I consider that they mismanaged the Vont case most shamefully. I would really prefer to keep away from them for a time."

David nodded.

"I have a letter to some lawyers, at my rooms," he said. "I will send you their address, and we can make an appointment to meet at their office."

The Marquis assented gravely. He considered that the matter was now better dismissed from further discussion.

"I have no doubt," he said, "that my sister would like to talk to you for a time. Shall we join the ladies?"

David threw away his cigar and professed his readiness. They crossed the hall and entered the drawing-room. There was one table of bridge, and Letitia was seated with her sister on a divan near the window. The former sighed as she watched the entrance of the two men.

"Do look at father, Meg," she whispered. "I am perfectly certain he has been borrowing money."

Margaret shrugged her shoulders.

"What if he has, my dear!" she rejoined. "These people can afford to pay for their entertainment. I think it's rather clever of him."

Letitia groaned.

"You have such ignoble ideas, Meg," she said reprovingly. "Now I know I shall have to make myself agreeable to Mr. Thain, and I either like him or dislike him immensely. I haven't the least idea which."

"I shouldn't be surprised," her sister whispered, as Thain approached, "if he didn't help you presently to make up your mind."

CHAPTER VII

Marcia Hannaway called upon her publisher during the course of the following day. She found the ready entrée of a privileged client—with scarcely a moment's delay she was ushered into the presence of James Borden, the person who for some years now had occupied the second place in her thoughts and life.

"Anything happened, Marcia?" he enquired, after their quiet but familiar greeting. "You look as though you were bringing Fate with you."

She made herself comfortable in the easy-chair which he had drawn up to the fire. Outside, an unexpectedly cold wind made the sense of warmth doubly pleasant. She unfastened her simple furs and smiled at him a little dolefully.

"Just this," she replied, handing him a letter.

He spread it out, adjusted his eyeglasses and read it deliberately:

94, GROSVENOR SQUARE, Thursday.

My dear Marcia:

I have made enquiries with reference to the non-payment of your allowance for the last two quarters, and now enclose cheque for the amount, drawn by my agent in Norfolk and payable to yourself. I think I can promise you that no further irregularities shall occur.

I look forward to seeing you to-morrow afternoon, and I must tell you of a financial operation I am now conducting, which, if successful, may enable me to pay off the mortgages which render the Norfolk estates so unremunerative.

I trust that you are well, dear. I have ordered Carlton White's to send in a few flowers, which I hope will arrive safely.

Yours,
REGINALD.

James Borden read the letter carefully, glanced at the small coronet at the top of the paper, and folded it up.

"I'm sorry, Marcia," he said simply.

She made a little grimace.

"My dear man," she confessed, "so am I. After all, though, I am not sure that the money makes all the difference. You see, if he really were too poor—or rather if his lawyers couldn't raise the money to send to me—I fancy that I should feel just the same."

The publisher turned his chair round towards the fire. He was a man of barely middle age, although his black hair was besprinkled with grey and growing a little thin at the temples. His features were good, but his face was a little thin, and his clothes were scarcely as tidy, or the appointments of his office so comfortable as his name and position in the publishing world might have warranted. Marcia, who had been looking at him while he read, leaned forward and brushed the cigarette ash from his coat sleeve.

"Such an untidy man!" she declared, straightening his tie. "I am not at all sure that you deserve to have lady clients calling upon you. Were you late last night?"

"A little," he confessed.

"That means about one or two, I suppose," she went on reprovingly.

"I dined at the club and stayed on," he told her. "There was nothing else to do except work, and I was a little tired of that."

"Any fresh stuff in—interesting stuff, I mean?"

He shook his head.

"Three more Russian novels," he replied, "all in French and want translating, of course. The only one I have read is terribly grim and sordid. I dare say it would sell. I am going to read the other two before I decide anything. Then perhaps you'll help me."

"Of course I will," she promised. "I do wish, though, James, you wouldn't stay at the club so late. How many whiskies and sodas?"

"I didn't count," he confessed.

She sighed.

"I know what that means! James, why aren't you a little more human? You get heaps of invitations to nice houses. Much better go out and make some women friends. You ought to marry, you know."

"I am quite ready to when you will marry me," he retorted.

"But, my dear man, I am bespoke," she reminded him. "You know that quite well. I couldn't possibly think of marrying anybody."

"What are you going to do with that money?" he demanded.

"I think I shall keep it," she decided. "Not to do so would hurt him terribly."

"And keeping it hurts me damnably!" he muttered.

She shook her head at him.

"We've had this over so often, haven't we? I cannot leave Reginald as long as he wants me, relies upon me as much as he does now."

"Why not?" was the almost rough demand. "He has had the best of your life."

"And he has given me a great deal of his," she retorted. "For nineteen years I have been his very dear friend. During all that time he has never broken a promise to me, never told a falsehood, never said a single word which could grate or hurt. If he has sometimes seemed a little aloof, it is because he really believes himself to be a great person. He believes in himself immensely, you know, James—in the privileges and sanctity of his descent. It seems so strange in this world, where we others see other things. If I only dared, I would write a novel about it."

"But you don't care for him any more?"

"Care for him?" she repeated. "How could I ever stop caring for him! He was my first lover, and has been my only one."

"Let me ask you a question," James Borden demanded suddenly. "Don't you ever feel any grudge against him? He took you away from a very respectable position in life. He ruined all sorts of possibilities. He was fifteen or twenty years older than you were, and he knew the world. You pleased him, and he deliberately entrapped your affections. Be honest, now. Don't you sometimes hate him for it?"

"Never," she answered without hesitation. "I was, as you say, most respectably placed—a teacher at a village school—and I might have married a young farmer, or bailiff's son, or, with great luck, a struggling young doctor, and lived a remarkably rural life, but, as you have observed, in great respectability. My dear James, I should have hated it. I was, I think, nineteen years old when Reginald, in a most courtly fashion, suggested that I should come to London with him, and I have exactly the same feelings to-day about my acceptance of his proposal as I had then."

"You are a puzzle," he declared. "You wouldn't be, of course, only you're such a—such a good woman."

"Of course I am, James," she laughed. "I am good, inasmuch as I am faithful to any tie I may make. I am kind, or try to be, to all my fellow creatures, and I should hate to do a mean thing. The only difference between me and other women is that I prefer to choose what tie I should consider sacred. I claimed the liberty to do that, and I exercised it. As to my right to do so, I have never had the faintest possible shadow of hesitation."

"Oh, it all sounds all right when you talk about it," he admitted, "but let's come to the crux of this thing now we are about it, Marcia. I am eating my heart out for you. I should have thought that one of the great privileges of your manner of life was your freedom to change, if you desired to do so. Change, I mean—nothing to do with infidelity. You may have the nicest feelings in the world towards your Marquis, but I don't believe you love him any more. I don't believe you care for him as much as you do for me."

"In one sense you are perfectly right," she acknowledged. "In another you are altogether wrong."

"And yet," he continued, almost roughly, "you have never allowed me to touch your fingers, much more your lips."

"But, my dear man," she remonstrated, "you must know that those things are impossible. I would kiss you willingly if you were my friend, and if you were content with that, but you know it would only be hypocrisy if you pretended that you were. But listen," she went on. "I, too, sometimes think of these things. I will be very frank with you. I know that I have changed lately, and I know that the change has something to do with you. Reginald is sometimes a little restless about it. A time may come when he will provoke an explanation. When that time comes, I want to answer him with a clear conscience."

Mr. James Borden brightened up considerably.

"That's the most encouraging thing I've heard you say for a long time," he confessed.

She smiled.

"There are all sorts of possibilities yet," she said. "Now fetch a clothes brush and let me give you a good brushing, and you can take me out to lunch—that is to say, if you can find something decent to wear on your head," she went on, pointing to a somewhat disreputable looking hat which hung behind the door. "I won't go out with you in that."

"That," he replied cheerfully, "is easily arranged. I can change my clothes in five minutes, if you prefer it."

She shook her head.

"You look quite nice when you're properly brushed," she assured him. "Send upstairs for another hat, and we'll go into the grill room at the Savoy. I want a sole colbert, and a cutlet, and some of those little French peas with sugar. Aren't I greedy!"

"Delightfully," he assented. "If you only realised how much easier it is to take a woman out who knows what she wants!"

They lunched very well amidst a crowd of cosmopolitans and lingered over their coffee. Their conversation had been of books and nothing but books, but towards the end Marcia once more spoke of herself.

"You see, James," she told him, "I have the feeling that if Reginald really does succeed in freeing the estates from their mortgages, he will have any quantity of new interests in life. He will probably be lord-lieutenant of the county, and open up the whole of Mandeleys. Then his town life would of course be quite different. I shall feel—can't you appreciate that?—as though my task with him had come naturally and gracefully to an end. We have both fulfilled our obligations to one another. If he can give me his hand and let me go—well, I should like it."

She looked so very desirable as she smiled at him that Borden almost groaned. She patted his hand and changed the conversation.

"Very soon," she continued, "I am going to undertake a painful duty. I am going down to Mandeleys."

"Not with him?"

She shook her head.

"My father is back in England," she explained. "He has come back from America and is living in the cottage of many lawsuits. I must go down and see him."

"Has the boy returned, too?" he enquired.

"I have heard nothing about him," Marcia replied. "He was very delicate when he was young, and I am not even sure whether he is alive. My father probably doesn't want to see me in the least, but I feel I ought to go."

"You wouldn't like me to motor you down, I suppose?" Borden suggested diffidently. "The country is delightful just now, and it would do us both good. I could get away for three days quite easily, and I could bring some work with me to peg away at whilst you are being dutiful."

"I should love it," she declared frankly, "and I don't see the least reason why we shouldn't go. You won't mind," she went on, after a second's hesitation, "if I mention it to Reginald? I am sure he won't object."

James Borden bit through the cigarette which he had just lit, threw it away and started another.

"You must do whatever you think right," he said. "Perhaps you will telephone."

"As soon as I know for certain," she promised him.

CHAPTER VIII

It was obvious that the Marquis was pleased with himself when he was shown into Marcia's little sitting room later on that same afternoon. He was wearing a grey tweed check suit, a grey bowler hat, and a bunch of hothouse violets in his buttonhole. His demeanour, as he drew off his white chamois leather gloves and handed them, with his coat and cane, to the little parlourmaid, was urbane, almost benevolent.

"You look like the springtime," Marcia declared, rising to her feet, "and here have I been cowering over the fire!"

"The wind is cold," her visitor admitted, "but I had a brisk walk along the Embankment."

"Along the Embankment?"

"I have been to one of those wonderful, cosmopolitan hotels," he told her, as he bent down and kissed her, "where they have hundreds of bedrooms and every guest is a potential millionaire."

"Business?"

"Business," he assented. "My lawyers—I am very displeased, by-the-by, with Mr. Wadham—having been unable for many years to assist me in disposing of the mortgages upon Mandeleys, I am making efforts myself in that direction, efforts which, as I believe I told you, show much promise of success."

"I am delighted to hear it," she replied. "From every point of view, it would be so satisfactory for you to have the estates freed once more. You would be able to entertain properly, wouldn't you, and take up your rightful position in the county?"

The Marquis seated himself in his favourite easy-chair.

"It is quite true," he confessed, "that I have been unable, for the last ten years, to exercise that position in the county to which I am entitled. I must confess, moreover, that the small economies which have formed a necessary and galling part of my daily life have become almost unendurable. You received my cheque, I hope?"

She nodded and laid it upon the table.

"It was dear of you, Reginald," she said, "but do you know it's astonishing how well I seemed to be able to get on without those last three payments. I am earning quite a great deal of money of my own, you know, and I do wish you would let me try and be independent."

His grey eyes were fixed almost coldly upon her.

"Independent? Why?"

"Oh, don't be foolish about it, please," she begged. "For nineteen years, I think it is now, you have allowed me six hundred a year. Do you realise what a great deal of money that is? Now that I am beginning to earn so much for myself, it is absurd for me to go on taking it."

"Do I understand it to be your desire, then, Marcia," he asked, "to effect any change in our relations?"

She came over and sat on the arm of his chair.

"Not unless you wish it, dear," she replied, "only the money—well, in a sense I've got used to having it all these years, because it was necessary, but now that it isn't necessary, I can't help feeling that I should like to do without it. I earned nearly six hundred pounds, you know, last year, by my stories."

The Marquis had half closed his eyes. He had become momentarily inattentive. Somehow or other, Marcia realised that her words had brought him acute suffering. There were tears in her eyes as she took his hand.

"Don't be silly about this, Reginald dear," she pleaded. "If it means so much to you to feel—I mean, if you look upon this money as really a tie between us—give me a little less, then—say three hundred a year, instead of six."

Her visitor was recovering his momentarily disturbed composure.

"You are still nothing but a child in money matters, dear," he said. "We will speak of this again before the end of the year, but in the meantime, if you have anything to spare, invest it. It is always well for a woman to have something to fall back upon."

Tea was brought in, and their conversation for a time became lighter in tone. Presently, however, Marcia became once more a little thoughtful.

"I have made up my mind," she declared abruptly, "to go down to Mandeleys to see my father."

The Marquis was silent for a moment. Then he shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, why not, if you really feel it to be your duty," he conceded. "Personally, I think you will find that Vont is unchanged. You will find him just as hard and narrow as when he disowned you."

"In that case," Marcia acknowledged, "I shall not trouble him very much, but when I think of all these years abroad—it was through me he left England, you know, Reginald—I feel that I ought to do my best, at any rate, to make him see things differently—to beg his forgiveness with my lips, even if I feel no remorse in my heart. I have a most uncomfortable conviction," she went on reflectively, "that I have grown completely out of his world, but, of course, in all this time he, too, may have changed. I wonder what has become of my little cousin."

"Vont came back alone, I believe," her visitor told her, "and he came back second class, too. I heard of him, curiously enough, from an American gentleman who crossed on the same steamer, and who happened to be a guest at my house the other night."

Marcia nodded.

"The boy left England too young," she remarked, "to miss his country. I suppose he has settled down in America for ever."

"I must say that I wish Vont had stayed with him," the Marquis declared. "Yes, go down and see him, by all means, Marcia. I should rather like to hear from you what his state of mind is. I gather that he is obdurate, as he resisted all my efforts to repossess myself of his cottage, but it would be interesting to hear."

"Should you mind," she asked, "if I motored down there with my publisher—Mr. James Borden? You have heard me speak of him."

"Not in the least," was the ready reply. "Has your friend connections in the locality?"

"None," Marcia admitted. "He would come simply for the sake of a day or two's holiday, and to take me."

"He is one of your admirers, perhaps?"

"He has always been very kind to me."

The Marquis was momentarily pensive.

"You are a better judge than I, Marcia," he observed, "but is such an expedition as you suggest—usual? I know that things have changed very much since the days when I myself found adventures possible and interesting, but have they really progressed so far as this?"

Marcia considered the matter carefully.

"On the whole," she decided, "I should say that our proposed expedition was unusual. On the other hand, Mr. Borden has no near relatives, and I myself enjoy a certain amount of liberty."

The Marquis smiled at her.

"As much liberty as you choose. If I hesitated then for a moment, it was for your own sake. I do not think that I have ever sought to curtail your pleasures, or to interfere in your mode of living."

"You have been wonderful," she admitted gratefully. "Perhaps for that very reason, because my fetters have been of silk, I have never realised but always considered them. Do you know that you are the only man who has ever sat down in this flat as my guest, during the whole sixteen years I have lived here?"

"I should never have asked you," he said, "but I am not in the least surprised to hear it. Sometimes," he went on, drawing her towards him in a slight but affectionate embrace, "you have perhaps thought me a little cold, a little staid and distant from you, even in our happiest moments. I was brought up, you must remember, in the school which considers any exhibition of feeling as a deplorable lapse. The thing grows on one. Yet, Marcia," he added, drawing her still closer and clasping her hand, "you have been my refuge in all these years. It is here with you that I have spent my happiest hours. You have been my consolation in many weary disappointments. I often wish that I could give you a different position than the one which you occupy."

"I should never be so contented in any other," she assured him, patting his hand. "In all these years I have felt my mind grow. I have read—heavens, how I have read! I have felt so many of the old things fall away, felt my feet growing stronger. You have given me just what I wanted, Reginald. To quote one of your own maxims, we have only one life, but it is for us to subdivide. We take up a handful of circumstances, an emotion, perhaps a passion, and we live them out, and when the flame is burnt we are restless for a little time, and then we begin it all over again. That is how we learn, learn to be wise by suffering and change."

"I am afraid," the Marquis sighed, "that I do not live up to my own principles. All my life I have detested change. There could be no other home for me but Mandeleys, no other clubs save those where I spend my spare time, no other pursuits save those which I have cultivated from my youth, no other dear friend, Marcia, to whom one may turn in one's more human moments, than you."

Marcia shrugged her shoulders.

"It is queer," she admitted, "to hear such professions of fidelity from you."

"Had I a different reputation?" he asked. "Well, you see how I have outlived it."

Marcia's silence, natural enough at the time, puzzled him a little afterwards, puzzled him as he leaned back in his car, on his way homewards, puzzled him through the evening in the few minutes of reflection which he was able to spare from a large dinner party.

"Borden!" he muttered to himself. "I wonder what sort of a man he is."

In his library, where he lingered for a few moments before retiring to bed, he took down a volume of "Who's Who." Borden's name, rather to his surprise, was there. The man, it seemed, was of decent family, had done well at Oxford, both in scholarship and athletics. He was born—the Marquis counted his years. He was forty-one years old—nineteen years younger! He closed the book and sat down in his chair, forgetting for once to mix for himself the whiskey and soda which lay ready to his hand. It seemed to him that there was a tragedy in that nineteen years. Borden was of the age now that he himself had been when Marcia had first listened to his very courtly and yet uncommonly definite love-making. He rose almost like a thief, crossed the hall, and, opening softly the door of the drawing-room, turned up the two lights before a great gilt mirror. He stood and regarded himself thoughtfully, appraisingly, critically. He was tall and very little bowed. His figure was still the figure of a young man, and the court clothes which he was wearing became him. That he was handsome so far as regards his finely chiselled features, his high forehead and his soft grey hair, he granted himself. The world had given him few chances of forgetting it. But there was a little whiteness about his cheeks, a slight dropping of the flesh under his eyes, just something of that tired look which creeps along with the years, a silent, persistent ghost. The Marquis switched off the lights and turned towards the door. He tiptoed his way across the hall and threw himself once more into his easy-chair. His eyes were fixed upon the opposite wall. He still saw that presentment of himself. And there was Marcia, barely in the prime of her life, the figure of her girlhood developed, yet not, even now, matronly; her bright complexion, her broad, intellectual forehead with its masses of brown hair, her humorous mouth, her dark, undimmed eyes, still hungry for what life might have to give. Those nineteen years remained a tragedy.

CHAPTER IX

David Thain, arrived at the end of his journey, seated himself on the second stile from the road, threw away his cigar and looked facts in the face. He who had run the gamut of the Wall Street fever, who in his earlier days had relied almost upon chance for a meal, who had stood the tests of huge successes as well as the anxieties of possible failures without visible emotion—in such a fashion, even, that his closest friends could scarcely tell whether he were winning or losing—found himself now, without any crisis before him, and engaged in the most ordinary undertaking of a stroll from the station across a few fields, suddenly the victim of sensations and weaknesses which defied analysis and mocked at restraint. It was the England of his boyhood, this, the sudden almost overpowering realisation of those dreams which had grown fainter and fainter during his many years of struggle in a very different atmosphere. Birds were singing in the long grove which, behind the high, grey-stone wall, fringed the road for miles. Rooks—real English rooks—were cawing above his head. A light evening breeze was bending the meadow grass of the field which his footpath had cloven, and from the hedge by his side came the faint perfume of hawthorn blossom. Before him was the park with its splendours of giant oaks, with deer resting beneath the trees, and in the distance the grey, irregular outline of Mandeleys Abbey. He had played cricket, when he was a boy, in the very field through which he was passing. Some time in that dim past, he had stood with his uncle, whilst he had issued with the beaters from that long strip of plantation, watching with all a boy's fervid admiration the careless ease with which the Lord of Mandeleys was bringing the pheasants down from the sky. He had skated on the lake there, had watched at a respectful distance the antics of the ladies Letitia and Margaret, anxious to escape from their retinue of servants and attendants. A queer little vision came before him at that moment of Lady Letitia hobbling towards him upon the ice, with one skate unbuckled, and a firm but gracious entreaty that the little boy—he was at least a head taller than she—would fasten it for her. Strange little flashes of memory had come to him now and then in that new world where he had carved his way to success, memories so indistinct that they brought with them no thrills, scarcely even any longing. And now all his strength and hardness, qualities so necessary to him throughout his strenuous life, seemed to have passed away. He was a child again, breathing in all these simple sights and perfumes, his memory taking him even further back to the days when he sat in the meadow, in the hot sun, picking daisies and buttercups, and watching for the fish that sometimes jumped from the stream. It was an entirely unexpected emotion, this. When once more he strode along the footpath, he felt a different man. He had lost his slight touch of assurance. He looked about him eagerly, almost appealingly. He was ashamed to confess even to himself that he had the feeling of a wanderer who has come home.

He crossed the last stile and was now in the park proper. Several villagers were strolling about under the trees, and they looked at this newcomer, with his dark-coloured clothes and strangely-shaped hat, with some surprise. Nevertheless, he held uninterruptedly on his way until he reached the broad drive which led to the Abbey. He walked on the turf by the side of it, over the bridge which crossed the stream, through the inner iron gates, beyond which the village people were not allowed to pass, and so to the well-remembered spot. On his right was the house—a strange, uneven building, at times ecclesiastical, here and there domestic, always ancient, with its wings of cloisters running almost down to the moat which surrounded it. And just over the moat, crossed by that light iron handbridge, with its back against what he remembered as a plantation, but which had now become a wood, the little red brick cottage, smothered all over with creepers, its tiny garden ablaze with flowers, its empty rows of dog kennels, its deserted line of coops. David glanced for a moment at the drawn blinds of the Abbey. Then he crossed the footbridge and the few yards of meadow, lifted the latch of the gate and, walking up the gravel path, came to a sudden standstill. A man who was seated almost hidden by a great cluster of fox-gloves rose to his feet.

"It's you, then, lad!" he exclaimed, holding out both his hands. "You're welcome! There's no one to the house—there won't be for a quarter of an hour—so I'll wring your hands once more. It's a queer world, this, David. You're back with me here, where I brought you up as a stripling, and yon's the Abbey. Sit you down, boy. I am not the man I was since I came here."

David Thain dragged an old-fashioned kitchen chair from the porch, and sat by his uncle's side. Richard Vont, although he was still younger than his sixty-four years, seemed to his nephew curiously changed during the last week. The hard, resolute face was disturbed. The mouth, kept so tight through the years, had weakened a little. There was a vague, almost pathetic agitation, in the man's face.

"You'll take no notice of me, David," his uncle went on. "I'm honest with you. These few days have been like a great, holy dream, like something one reads of in the Scriptures but never expects to see. There's old Mary Wells—she's doing for me up there. Just a word or two of surprise, and a grip of the hand, and no more. And there's the Abbey—curse it!—not a stone gone, only the windows are blank. You see the weeds on the lawn, David? Do you mark the garden behind? They tell me there's but two gardeners there to do the work of twenty. And the drive—look at it as far as you can see—moss and weed! They're coming down in the world, these Mandeleys, David. Even this last little lawsuit, the lawyers told me, has cost the Marquis nineteen thousand pounds. God bless you for your wealth, David! It's money that counts in these days."

David produced a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and handed it over to his uncle, who filled a pipe eagerly.

"That's thoughtful of you, David," he declared. "I'd forgotten to buy any, and that's a fact, for I can't stand the village yet. You're looking strange-like, David."

"And I feel it," was the quiet answer. "Uncle, hasn't it made any difference to you, this coming back?"

"In what way?" the old man asked.

"Well, I don't know. I walked across those fields to the park, and I seemed suddenly to feel more like a boy again, and I felt that somehow I was letting go of things. Do you know what I mean?"

"Letting go of things," Richard Vont repeated suspiciously. "No!"

"Well, somehow or other," David continued, as he filled his own pipe and lit it, "I found myself looking back through the years, and I wondered whether we hadn't both let one thing grow too big in our minds. Life doesn't vary much here. Things are very much as we left them, and it's all rather wonderful. I felt a little ashamed, as I came up through the park, of some of the things we've planned and sworn. Didn't you feel a little like that, uncle? Can you sit here and think of the past, and remember all that burden we carried, and not feel inclined to let it slip, or just a little of it slip, from our shoulders?"

Vont laid down his pipe. He rose to his feet. His fingers suddenly gripped his nephew's shoulder. He turned him towards the house.

"Listen, David," he said; "there's twilight an hour away yet, but it will soon be here. The blackbirds are calling for it, and the wind's dropping. Now you see. That was her room," he added, touching the window, "and there's the door out, just the same. You see that tree there? I was crouching behind that with my gun ready loaded, and there was murder in my heart—I tell you that, boy. I watched the Abbey. I was supposed to be safe in Fakenham Town, safe for a good two hours, and I lay there and watched because I knew, and no one came. And then I heard a whisper. I turned my head, although I was most afeared, and out of that door—that door from Marcia's room, David—I saw him come. I saw her arms come out and draw him back, and then I began to breathe hard, but the trees were thick that way—I'd been looking for him coming from the Abbey—-and they stole out together, arm in arm. I was so near them that they must have heard me groan, for Marcia started. And then, before I knew what was happening, he—the Marquis, mind—had struck up my gun, caught it by the barrel and sent it flying. My hand was on his throat, but he was as strong as I was, in those days, and a mighty wrestler. It's my shame, boy, after all these years to have to confess it, but he got the better of me. I was crazy with anger, and he had me down. And then he stood aside and bade me get up, and my strength seemed all gone. He stood there looking at me contemptuously. 'Don't make a fool of yourself, Vont,' he said. 'Your daughter and I understand one another, and our concerns have nothing to do with you. If you have anything to say to me, come up to the Abbey to-morrow. You'll find your gun in the thicket.' He turned round and he kissed Marcia's fingers, just like I'd seen them do in the distance at their fine parties up there, and he strolled away. There was the gun in the thicket, and he knew it, and I knew it, and I couldn't move, and he went. And all I could hear was Marcia crying, and those birds singing behind, and I just slipped away into the wood."

"Uncle, is it worth while bringing this all up again?" David interrupted.

"Aye, it's worth while!" the old man insisted fiercely. "It's worth while for fear I should forget, for the old place has its cling on me. That next day I went to the Abbey, and I saw the Marquis. He was quite cool, sent the servants out—he'd no weapon near—and he talked a lot that I don't understand and never shall understand, but it was about Marcia, and that she was his, and was leaving with him for London that evening. I just asked him one question. 'It's for shame, then?' I asked. And he looked at me just as though I were some person whom he was trying to make understand, who didn't quite speak the language. And he said—'Your daughter made her choice months ago, Vont. She will live the life she desires to live. I am sorry to take her away from you. Think it over, and try and feel sensible about it.' It was then I felt a strange joy, that I've never been able rightly to understand. I'd just remembered that the cottage was mine, and I had a sudden feeling that I wanted to sit at the end of the garden and watch the Abbey and curse it, curse it with a Bible on my knee, till its stones fell apart and the grass grew up from the walks and the damp grew out in blotches on the walls. And that's why I've come back after all these years."

"And you're just the same?" David asked curiously. "You feel just the same about him?"

"Don't you, my lad?" his uncle demanded. "You're not telling me that you're climbing down?"

David took the old man's arm.

"On the contrary, uncle," he said, "my promised share of the work is done. I hold his promissory notes for forty thousand pounds, due in three months. I have sold him some shares that aren't worth forty thousand pence, and won't be for many a year. I've cheated him, if you like, but when the three months comes you can make him a bankrupt, if you will. I'll give you the notes."

Richard Vont drew himself up. He turned his face towards the Abbey, growing a little indistinct now in the falling twilight.

"It's grand hearing," was all he said. "There's Mary, coming round with the supper, boy. I'll take the liberty of asking you to have a bite with me and a glass of ale, but I'll not forget that you're the great David Thain, the millionaire from America, who took kindly notice of me on the steamer. Come this way, sir," he went on, throwing open the cottage door. "It's a queer little place, but it's a novelty for you American gentlemen. Step right in, sir. Mrs. Wells," he announced, "this is a gentleman who was kind to me upon the steamer, and he promised that if ever he was this way he'd drop in. He'll take some supper with me. You'll do your best for us?"

The old lady looked very hard at David Thain, and she dropped a curtsey.

"From America, too," she murmured. "'Tis a wonderful country! Aye, I'll do my best, Richard Vont."

CHAPTER X

Mr. Wadham, Junior, a morning or so later, rang the bell at Number 94 Grosvenor Square and aired himself for a moment upon the broad doorstep, filled with a comfortable sense that this time, at least, in his prospective interview, he was destined to disturb the disconcerting equanimity of his distinguished client. He was duly admitted and ushered into the presence of the Marquis, who laid down the newspaper which he was reading, nodded affably to his visitor and pointed to a chair.

"Your request for an interview, Mr. Wadham," the former said, "anticipated my own desire to see you. Pray be seated. I am entirely at your service."

Mr. Wadham paused for a moment and decided to cross his legs. He was already struggling against that enervating sense of insignificance which his client's presence inevitably imposed upon him.

"We heard yesterday morning from Mr. Merridrew," he commenced. "He made us a remittance which was four hundred pounds short of what we expected. His explanation was that your lordship had received that sum from him."

"Quite right, Mr. Wadham," the Marquis assented affably. "Quite right. I was in the neighbourhood, and, finding Mr. Merridrew with a considerable sum of money in hand, I took from him precisely the amount you have stated."

"Your lordship has perhaps overlooked the fact," Mr. Wadham continued, "that we are that amount short of the interest on the Fakenham mortgage—Number Seven mortgage, we usually call it."

"Dear me!" the Marquis observed. "Surely such a trifling sum does not disturb your calculations? You do not run my affairs on so narrow a margin as this, I trust, Mr. Wadham?"

"It isn't a question of a narrow margin, your lordship," Mr. Wadham replied. "There is, as a rule, no margin at all. We usually have to make the amount up by overdrawing, or by advancing it ourselves. This time the firm wish me to point out that we are unable to do either."

"Dear me! Dear me!" the Marquis ejaculated, in a tone of some concern. "I had no idea, Mr. Wadham, if you will forgive my saying so, that your firm was in so impecunious a position."

"Impecunious?" the lawyer murmured, with his eyes fixed upon his client. "I scarcely follow your lordship."

"Did I not understand you to say," the Marquis continued, "that this trifle of four hundred pounds has upset your arrangements to such an extent that you are unable to make your customary payments on my behalf?"

"Will your lordship forgive my pointing out," Mr. Wadham explained, "that these payments are on your account, and that it is no part of the business of solicitors to finance their clients, without a special arrangement? We have our own more lucrative investments continually open to us, and we are at the present moment several thousand pounds out of pocket on account of recent law expenses."

"The whole thing," the Marquis pronounced, "seems to me very trifling. State in precise terms, if you please, Mr. Wadham, the object of your visit."

"To ask for your lordship's instructions as to the payment of twelve hundred pounds interest, due to-morrow," Mr. Wadham replied. "We have eight hundred pounds in hand from Mr. Merridrew. So far from having any other funds of your lordship's at our disposal, we are, as I have pointed out, your creditor for a somewhat considerable amount."

The Marquis was leaning back in his chair, the tips of his long, elegant fingers pressed gently together.

"It appears to me, Mr. Wadham," he said quietly, "that your visit is, in a sense, an admonitory one. Your firm resents—am I not right?—the fact that I have found it convenient to help myself to a portion of the revenue accruing from my estate."

"We should not presume for a moment to take up such an attitude," the lawyer protested. "On the other hand, the four hundred pounds in question requires replacement by to-morrow."

"And you find the raising of that sum inconvenient, eh, Mr. Wadham?"

The young man was distinctly ill at ease. His instructions were to be firm and dignified but by no means to offend; to deliver a formal protest against this tampering with funds already dedicate, but to do or say nothing which would give the Marquis any excuse for reprisals against the firm. Mr. Wadham began to wonder whether perhaps he was a person of small tact, or whether these instructions were more than usually difficult to carry out.

"There is no sacrifice, your lordship," he said slowly, "which my firm would hesitate to make in your interests and the interests of the Mandeleys estate. At the same time, the unexpected necessity for finding these sums of money is, I must confess, at times a strain upon us."

The Marquis nodded sympathetically. He rose to his feet, crossed the room towards his desk, which he unlocked with a key attached to a gold chain, and returned with a bundle of scrip in his hand.

"I have here, Mr. Wadham," he announced, "scrip in a very famous oil company, the face value of the shares being, I believe, a trifle over forty thousand pounds. I, in fact, paid that price for them at the beginning of the week."

The young lawyer uncrossed his legs and swallowed hard. He was prepared for many shocks, but this one seemed outside the region of all human probability.

"Did I understand your lordship to say that you had paid forty thousand pounds for them?" he gasped.

The Marquis assented with an equable little nod.

"I was somewhat favoured in the matter," he admitted, "as the value of the shares has, I believe, already considerably increased. The amount I actually paid for them was, in round figures, forty thousand and one hundred pounds—transfer duty, or something of that sort. I have little head for figures, as you know, Mr. Wadham. You had better take these—not for sale, mind, but for deposit at one of my banks. You will probably find that, under the circumstances, they will permit you to overdraw an additional five hundred pounds on my account, without embarrassing your own finances."

Mr. Wadham, Junior, took the bundle of scrip into his hand, and glanced hastily through it.

"The Pluto Oil Company of Arizona," he murmured reflectively.

"The name of the company is doubtless unknown to you," the Marquis observed indulgently; "they are, in fact, only just commencing operations—but it is the opinion of my friend and financial adviser, Mr. David Thain, that the forty thousand pounds' worth of shares you have in your hand will be worth at least two hundred thousand before the end of the year."

"Mr. David Thain, the multi-millionaire?" Mr. Wadham faltered.

"The same!"

The lawyer gripped the bundle hard in one hand, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again and struck out boldly.

"As your lordship's adviser," he said, "may I enquire as to the nature of the payment which you have made? Forty thousand pounds is not a sum which either of the banks with whom your lordship has credit—"

The Marquis waved his hand.

"My dear young friend," he explained, "it was not necessary for me to resort to banks. Mr. Thain suggested voluntarily that I should give him my note of hand for the amount. He quite understood that a man whose chief interest in the country is land does not keep such a sum as forty thousand pounds lying at his banker's."

Mr. Wadham groped for his hat.

"The shares shall be deposited, and the interest, of course, paid," he murmured. "I am sorry to have troubled your lordship in the matter."

"Not at all, not at all," the Marquis replied genially. "Very pleased to see you at any time, Mr. Wadham, on any subject connected with the estates. Ah!" he added, glancing at a card which a footman at that moment had brought in, "here is my friend, Mr. David Thain. You must meet him, Mr. Wadham. Such men are rare in this country. They form most interesting adjuncts to our modern civilisation. Show Mr. Thain in, Thomas."

David Thain duly arrived. He shook hands with the Marquis and was by him presented to Mr. Wadham.

"Mr. Wadham is my legal advisor—or rather a junior representative of the firm who conduct my affairs," the Marquis explained. "I have just handed him over my shares in the Pluto Oil Company, for safe keeping."

"Very glad to know you, Mr. Thain," the young lawyer observed, reverently shaking hands. "One reads a great deal of your financial exploits in the newspapers just now."

"I really can't see," David replied, "that your press men are much better over here than in the States. In any case, Mr. Wadham, you mustn't believe all you read."

"You will give my regards to your father and the other members of your firm," the Marquis concluded, with the faintest possible indication of his head towards the door. "I shall probably have some instructions of an interesting nature to give you before long, with regard to the cancellation of, at any rate, the home estate mortgages. Ah, here is Thomas! Very much obliged for your attention, Mr. Wadham."

The lawyer made his adieux in somewhat confused fashion, and left the room with an ignominious sense of dismissal. The Marquis glanced at the clock.

"I am a creature of habit, Mr. Thain," he said. "At twelve o'clock I walk for an hour in the Park. Will you give me the honour of your company?"

"Anywhere you say," David assented. "There was just a little matter I wanted to mention—nothing important."

"Precisely," the Marquis murmured, ringing the bell. "You will return to lunch, of course? I shall take no denial. My daughter would be distressed to miss you. Gossett," he added, as they moved out into the hall, "my coat and hat, and tell Lady Letitia that Mr. Thain will lunch with us. Have you any idea, Gossett," he added, as he accepted his cane and gloves, "how to make cocktails?"

"I have a book of recipes, your lordship," was the somewhat doubtful reply.

"See that cocktails are served before luncheon," the Marquis instructed. "You see, we are not altogether ignorant of the habits of your countrymen, Mr. Thain, even if in some cases we may not ourselves have adopted them. A cocktail is, I gather, some form of alcoholic nourishment?"

Thain indulged in what was, for him, a rare luxury—a hearty laugh. He threw his head back, showing all his white, firm teeth, and the little lines at the sides of his eyes wrinkled up with enjoyment. Suddenly a voice on the stairs interposed.

"I must know the joke," Letitia declared. "How do you do, Mr. Thain? A laugh like yours makes one feel positively delirious with the desire to share it. Father, do tell me what it was?"

"To tell you the truth, my dear," the Marquis replied, quite honestly, "I am a little ignorant as to the humorous application of a remark I have just made."

"It was your father's definition of an American institution, Lady Letitia," David explained, "and I am afraid that its humour depended solely upon a certain environment which I was able to conjure up in my mind—a barroom at the Waldorf, say."

"Another disappointment," Letitia sighed.

"Mr. Thain is lunching with us, dear," her father announced.

"So glad," Letitia remarked, nodding to Thain. "We shall meet again, then."

She passed out of the front door, and David, who was very observant, noticing several things, was silent for the first few moments after her departure. She appeared, as she could scarcely fail to appear in his eyes, charming even to the point of bewilderment. Yet, although the wind was cold, she had only a small and very inadequate fur collar around her neck. Her tailormade suit showed signs of constant brushings. There was a little—a very modest little patch upon her shoes, and a very distinct darn upon her gloves. David frowned in puzzled fashion as he turned into the Park. Some of his boyish antipathies, so carefully nursed by his uncle and fostered by the atmosphere in which they lived during his early days in America, flashed into his memory, only to be instantly discarded. He remembered the drawn blinds, the weedy walks of Mandeleys; the hasty glimpse which he had had of silent, empty rooms and uncarpeted ways in the higher storeys of the mansion in Grosvenor Square.

"I am not a person," the Marquis observed, as they proceeded upon their promenade, "who needs a great deal of exercise, but I am almost a slave to habit, and for many years, when in town, it has been my custom to walk here for an hour, to exchange greetings, perhaps, with a few acquaintances, to call at my club for ten minutes and take a glass of dry sherry before luncheon. In the afternoons," he went on, "I occasionally play a round of golf at Ranelagh. Are you an expert at the game, Mr. Thain?"

"I have made blasphemous efforts," David confessed, "but I certainly cannot call myself an expert. Perhaps what is known as the American spirit has rather interfered with my efforts. You see, we want to get things done too quickly. Golf is a game eminently suited to the British temperament."

"You are doubtless right," the Marquis murmured. "That loitering backward swing, eh?—the lazy indisposition to raise one's head? I follow you, Mr. Thain. Your call this morning, by-the-by," he went on. "You have some news, perhaps, of these Pluto Oils?"

David shook his head.

"I came to see you," he announced, "upon a different matter."

CHAPTER XI

The Marquis was occupied for several minutes in exchanging greetings with passing acquaintances. As soon as they were alone again, he reverted to his companion's observation.

"There was a matter, I think you said, Mr. Thain, which you wished to discuss with me."

"I was going to ask you about Broomleys," David replied.

The Marquis was puzzled.

"Broomleys? Are you referring, by chance, to my house of that name?"

"I guess so."

"But, my dear Mr. Thain, you surprise me," the Marquis declared. "When did you hear of Broomleys?"

"I should have explained," David continued, "that I spent this last week-end at Cromer. There I visited an agent and told him that I would like to take a furnished house in the neighbourhood. I motored over, at his suggestion, to see Broomleys, and the tenant, Colonel Laycey, kindly showed me over. He is leaving within a few days, I believe."

"Dear me, of course he is!" the Marquis observed genially. "I had quite forgotten the fact—quite forgotten it."

The Marquis saluted more acquaintances. He was glad of an opportunity for reflection. The Fates were indeed smiling upon him! A gleam of anticipatory delight shone in his eyes as he thought of his next interview with Mr. Wadham, Junior! On his desk at the present moment there lay a letter from the firm, announcing Colonel Laycey's departure and adding that they saw little hope of letting the house at all in its present condition.

"It would be a great pleasure to us, Mr. Thain," the Marquis continued pleasantly, "to have you for a neighbour. Did the agent or Colonel Laycey, by-the-by, say anything about the rent?"

"Nothing whatever," David replied. "The Colonel pointed out to me various repairs which certainly seemed necessary, but as I am a single man, the rooms affected could very well be closed for a time. It was the garden, I must confess, which chiefly attracted me."

"Broomleys has, I fear, been a little neglected," the Marquis sighed. "These stringent days, with their campaign of taxation upon the landed proprietor, have left me, I regret to say, a poor man. Colonel Laycey was not always considerate. His last letter, I remember, spoke of restorations which would have meant a couple of years' rent."

"If I find any little thing wants doing urgently when I get there," David promised carelessly, "I will have it seen to myself. If the rent you ask is not prohibitive, it is exactly the place I should like to take for, say, a year, at any rate."

"You are a man of modest tastes, Mr. Thain," the Marquis observed. "The fact that you are unmarried, however, of course renders an establishment an unnecessary burden. You will bear in mind, so far as regards the rent of Broomleys, Mr. Thain, that the house is furnished."

"Very uncomfortably but very attractively furnished, from what I saw," David assented.

The Marquis collected himself. Colonel Laycey had been asked three hundred a year and was paying two hundred, a sum which, somehow or other, the Marquis had always considered his own pocket money, and which had never gone into the estate accounts. A little increase would certainly be pleasant.

"Would five hundred a year seem too much, Mr. Thain?" he asked. "I cannot for the moment remember what Colonel Laycey is paying, but I know that it is something ridiculously inadequate."

"Five hundred a year would be quite satisfactory," David agreed.

"I will have the papers drawn up and sent to you at once," the Marquis promised. "You will be able to enter into possession as soon as you like. You would like a yearly tenancy, I presume?"

"That would suit me quite well."

"You will be able, also, to resume your acquaintance with that singular old man whom you met upon the steamer—Richard Vont," the Marquis remarked, with a slight grimace. "I hear that he is in residence there."

"I have already done so," David announced.

The Marquis raised his eyebrows.

"You have probably heard his story, then, from his own lips," he observed carelessly. "I am told that he sits out on the lawn of his cottage, reading the Bible and cursing Mandeleys. It is a most annoying thing, Mr. Thain, as I dare say you can understand, to have your ex-gamekeeper entrenched, as it were, in front of your premises, hurling curses across the moat at you. That class of person is so tenacious of ideas as well as of life. Here comes my daughter Letitia, already well escorted, I see."

Letitia, with Grantham by her side, waved her hand without pausing, from the other side of the broad pathway. David for a moment felt the chill of the east wind.

"Grantham," the Marquis told his companion confidentially, "is one of Lady Letitia's most constant admirers. My daughter, as I dare say you have discovered, Mr. Thain, is rather an unusual young woman. Her predilections are almost anti-matrimonial. Still, I must confess that an alliance with the Granthams would give me much pleasure. I should, in that case, be enabled to give up my town house and be content with bachelor apartments—a great saving, in these hard times."

"Naturally," David murmured.

"Often, in the course of our very agreeable conversations," the Marquis went on, "I am inclined to ignore the fact of your most amazing opulence. My few friends, I am sorry to say, are in a different position. Money in this country is very scarce, Mr. Thain—very scarce, at least, on this side of Temple Bar."

David answered a little vaguely. His eyes were lifted above the heads of the scattered crowd of people through which they were passing.

"May I ask—if it is not an impertinence," he said,—"is Lady Letitia engaged to Lord Charles Grantham?"

The Marquis's manner was perhaps a shade stiffer. Mr. Thain was just given to understand that about the family matters of such a personage as the Marquis of Mandeleys there must always be a certain reticence.

"There is no formal engagement, Mr. Thain," he replied. "The fashion nowadays seems to preclude anything of the sort. One's daughter just brings a young man in, and, in place of the delightful betrothal of our younger days, the date for the marriage is fixed upon the spot."

Luncheon at 94 Grosvenor Square, notwithstanding the cocktails, was an exceedingly simple meal, a fact which the Marquis himself seemed scarcely to notice. He kept his eye on his visitor's plate, however, and passed the cutlets with an unnoticeable sigh of regret.

"Charlie wouldn't come in to lunch, father," Letitia announced. "I think he was afraid you were going to ask him his intentions."

The Marquis glanced at the modicum of curry with which he was consoling himself.

"Upon the whole, my dear," he said, "I am glad that he stayed away. He is a most agreeable person, but not at his best at luncheon time. By-the-by, do you know who our new neighbour is to be at Broomleys?"

"You haven't let it?" she asked eagerly.

"This morning, my dear," her father replied, bowing slightly towards their guest. "Mr. Thain has been spending the week-end at Cromer, was offered Broomleys by the agent there, and he and I fixed up the matter only a few minutes ago."

"How perfectly delightful!" Letitia exclaimed.

David glanced up quickly. He looked his hostess in the eyes.

"That is very kind of you, Lady Letitia," he said. She laughed at him.

"Well, I meant it," she declared, "and I still mean it, but not, perhaps, exactly in the way it sounded. Of course, it will be very pleasant to have you for a neighbour, but to tell you the truth—you see, although we're poor we are honest—our own sojourn at Mandeleys rather depends on whether we let Broomleys, and Colonel Laycey, although he has the most delightful daughter, with whom you are sure to fall in love, was a most troublesome tenant. He was always wanting things done, wasn't he, father?"

"It is certainly a relief," the Marquis sighed, watching with satisfaction the arrival of half a Stilton cheese, a present from his son-in-law, "a great relief to find a tenant like Mr. Thain."

"I asked your agent," David remarked a little diffidently, "about the shooting."

The Marquis touched his glass.

"Serve port, Gossett," he directed,—"the light wood port, if we have any," he added a little hastily, to the obvious relief of his domestic. "The shooting, eh, Mr. Thain?"

He sipped his wine and considered. First Broomleys, and then the shooting! The gods were very kind to him on this pleasant April morning.

"You haven't preserved lately, I understand," his guest observed.

"Not for some years," the Marquis acknowledged.

"I don't mind about that at all," David went on. "I am just American enough, you know, to find no pleasure in shooting tame birds. I shall have no parties, and I shall not be ambitious about bags. I like to prowl about myself with a gun."

His host nodded appreciatively.

"You shall have the refusal of the shooting," he promised. "At the moment I am not prepared to quote terms. My people of business can do that."

"Have you no friends in England, Mr. Thain?" Letitia asked, a little abruptly.

"Very few," David replied. "I do not make friends easily."

"I always thought Americans were so sociable," she remarked. "A great many of your compatriots have settled down here, you know."

David considered the matter for a moment.

"You would smile, I suppose," he said, "if I were to tell you that there are more so-called 'sets' in American Society than in your own. I am a very self-made man indeed, and I possess no womenkind to entertain for me. I am therefore dependent upon chance acquaintances."

"Such friends as may make your sojourn in Norfolk more agreeable, Mr. Thain," the Marquis promised genially, "you shall most certainly find. Mandeleys will always be open to you."

David made no immediate response. His teeth had come together with a little click. He felt a strange repugnance to lifting the glass, which the butler had just filled, to his lips. A queer little vision of Mandeleys and the cottage was there, Richard Vont, seated amongst those drooping rose bushes, his face turned towards the Abbey, his eyes full of that strange, expectant light. A sudden wave of self-disgust almost broke through a composure which had so far resisted all assaults upon it. Almost he felt that he must rise from his place, tell this strange, polished, yet curiously childlike being the truth—that he was being drawn into the nets of ruin—that he was entertaining an enemy unawares.

"You must really try that wine, Mr. Thain," he heard his host say gently. "I make no excuse for not offering you vintage port. At Mandeleys I have at least the remnants of a cellar. You shall dine with us there, Mr. Thain, and I will give you what my grandfather used to declare was 1838 vintage."

David roused himself with an effort. He brushed aside the uncomfortable twinge of conscience which had suddenly depressed him, and turning away from Letitia, looked his host in the eyes.

"You are very kind," he said. "I shall come with much pleasure."

CHAPTER XII

The Duchess waved her sugar tongs imperiously, and David, who had hesitated upon the threshold of her drawing-room, made his way towards her. There were a dozen people sitting around, drinking tea and chatting in little groups.

"Now don't look sulky, please," she begged, as she gave him her left hand. "This is not a tea party, and it is quite true that I did ask you to come and have a chat with me alone, but I couldn't keep these people away. They'll all go directly, and if they don't I shall turn them out. Letitia has promised me to take care of you and to see that no one bites. Letitia, here is the shy man," she added. "There!"—thrusting a cup of tea into his hand. "Take that, help yourself to a muffin and go and hide behind the piano."

Letitia rose from her place by the side of an extremely loquacious politician, to whose animated conversation she had paid no attention since David's entrance.

"You hear my aunt's orders?" she said, nodding. "Don't try to shake hands, with that collection of things to carry. I am to pilot you into a corner and keep you quite safe until she is ready to take possession of you herself."

David looked longingly at some French windows which led out on to a wide stone terrace.

"Why not outside?" he suggested. "It's really quite warm to-day."

"Why not, indeed?" she assented. "Come along."

They passed out together, found two comfortable wicker chairs and a small table, on which, with a sigh of relief, David deposited his burden. Below them was a stretch of the Park, from which they themselves were screened by a row of tall trees.

"Don't sit down," she begged him. "Get me another of those small muffins first, and a cup of tea. If any one suggests coming out here, bolt the windows after you."

David executed his task as speedily as possible. Letitia watched him a little curiously as he returned.

"You aren't really a bit shy, you know," she told him. "I watched you through the window there. How clever you were not to see that tiresome Mrs. Raymond!"

"Why should I see her?" he asked. "She is a perfect stranger to me. She came up to me at a party, the other night, and asked me, as a great favour, to dine at her house and to tell her how to invest some money so that she could double it."

"I know," Letitia assented, with her mouth full of muffin. "She does that to all the financiers and expects them to give her tips just because she has dark eyes and asks them to a tête-à-tête dinner. I expect we are all as bad, though," she went on rather gloomily, "even if we are not quite so blatant. What on earth have you been doing to father? He swaggers about as though he were already a millionaire."

"I expect we are all as bad, though," she went on rather gloomily, "even if we are not quite so blatant."

David smiled a little sadly as he looked out across the tree tops.

"Your father has rather a sanguine temperament," he said.

"Well, don't encourage him to speculate, please," Letitia begged. "We couldn't afford to lose a single penny. As it is," she went on, "we are only able to come to Mandeleys because you've taken that ramshackle old barn close by and paid twice as much as it's worth. About the shooting, too! I almost laughed aloud when you mentioned it! Do you know, Mr. Thain, that we haven't reared a pheasant for years, and that we don't even feed the wild ones?"

"What about the partridges, though," he reminded her, "and the hares? I talked to a farmer when I was down there the other day, and he complained bitterly that there was only one vermin-killer on the whole estate and that the place was swarming with rabbits. I rather enjoy rabbit shooting."

"Oh, well, so long as you understand," Letitia replied, with a little shrug of the shoulders, "take the shoot, for goodness' sake, and pay dad as much as he chooses to ask for it. I've always noticed," she went on reflectively, "one extraordinary thing about people who haven't the faintest idea of business. They are always much cleverer than a real business man in asking ever so much more than a thing is worth. A person with a sense of proportion, you see, couldn't do it."

"One would imagine," he complained, "that you were trying to keep me away from Mandeleys."

"Don't, please, imagine such a thing," she begged earnestly. "If there is anything I hate, it's London—or rather hate the way we have to live here. You are entirely our salvation. If you desert us now, I shall be the most miserable person alive. Only, you see, I know what father is, and what you do you must do with your eyes open."

He was silent for a moment. The echo of her words lingered in his ears. He moved a little uneasily in his place, more uneasily still when he found that she was watching him intently.

"You are really a very mysterious person, Mr. Thain," she declared, with a note of curiosity in her tone. "I hear that you decline to be interviewed, and you won't even tell the newspapers whether this is your first visit to England or not."

"I don't see what business it is of the newspapers," he rejoined. "I am not a person of any possible interest to any one. I have done nothing except make a great deal of money. That, too, was purely a matter of good fortune and a little foresight. In America," he went on, "one expects to meet with that personal curiosity. Over here, I must say that it surprises me."

"I suppose you are right," she admitted, "but, you see, under the present conditions of living, the possession of money does give such enormous power to any one. Then you must remember that our press has become Americanised lately. However, I am not a journalist, so will you answer me one question?"

"Certainly," he replied.

"Have you ever been in England before?"

"Once."

"Long ago?"

"A great many years ago."

"I don't really know why I am curious," she went on thoughtfully, "but there was a time, when I saw you first—doesn't this sound hackneyed, but it's quite true—when I fancied that I'd seen you before. It worried me for days. Even now it sometimes perplexes me."

He hated the lie which had risen so readily to his lips and choked it back.

"A dear lady, a friend of the Duchess, made the same remark to me when we were introduced," he said. "She excused herself gracefully by saying that people were so much alike, nowadays."

"I don't think that you are particularly like other people," she observed, studying him. "Would you like to hear what Ada Honeywell thinks about you?"

"So long as it leaves me still able to hold up my head," he murmured. "Mrs. Honeywell struck me as being rather severe in her strictures."

"It was only of your appearance she was speaking," Letitia continued. "She said that she could see three things in your face—a Franciscan monk, a head maïtre d'hôtel at the most select of French restaurants, and the modern decadent criminal, as opposed to the Charles Peace type."

"I am much obliged, I'm sure," he remarked, leaning back and laughing for once quite naturally. "My type of criminal, I presume, is one who brings art to his aid in working out his nefarious schemes."

"Precisely," she murmured. "Like Wainwright, the poisoner, or the Borgias. But at any rate we agreed upon something. There is purpose in your face."

"You speak as though that were unusual! I suppose we all have a set course in life."

She nodded.

"And a good deal depends upon the goal, doesn't it?"

There was a brief—to David, an enigmatic pause. Letitia's questions had puzzled him. She might almost have suspected his identity. They both listened idly for a few moments to the music of a violin, which some one was playing in the drawing-room.

"You've asked me a great many questions," he said abruptly. "What about you? What is your goal?"

"My dear Mr. Thain," she replied, "how can you ask! I am an impecunious young woman of luxurious tastes. It is my purpose to entrap somebody with a comfortable income into marrying me. I have been at it for several seasons," she went on a little dolefully, "but so far Charles Grantham is my only certainty, and he wobbles sometimes—especially when he sees anything of Sylvia Laycey."

"Sylvia Laycey," he repeated. "Is she the daughter of the present tenant of Broomleys?"

Letitia nodded.

"And a very charming girl, too," she declared. "You'll most certainly fall in love with her. Everybody does when she comes up to stay with me."

"Falling in love isn't one of my ordinary amusements," he observed a little drily.

"Superior person!" she mocked.

The Duchess suddenly appeared upon the balcony.

"Look here," she said, "there's been quite enough of this. Mr. Thain came especially to see me. Every one else has gone."

"I wonder if that might be considered a hint," Letitia observed, glancing at the watch upon her wrist. "All right, aunt, I'll go. You wouldn't believe, Mr. Thain," she added, buttoning her gloves, "that one's relations are supposed to be a help to one in life?"

"You're only wasting your time with Mr. Thain, dear," her aunt replied equably. "I've studied his character. We were eight days on that steamer, you know, and all the musical comedy young ladies in the world seemed to be on board, and I can give you my word that Mr. Thain is a woman-hater."

"I am really more interested in him now than I have ever been before," Letitia declared, laughing into his eyes. "My great grievance with Charlie Grantham is that he cannot keep away from our hated rivals in the other world. However, you'll talk to me again, won't you, Mr. Thain?"

David was conscious of a curious fit of reserve, a sudden closing up of that easy intimacy into which they seemed to have drifted.

"I shall always be pleased," he said stiffly.

Letitia kissed her aunt and departed. The Duchess sank into her empty place.

"I am going to be a beast," she began. "Have you been lending money to my brother?"

"Not a sixpence," David assured her.

The Duchess was evidently staggered.

"You surprise me," she confessed. "However, so much the better. It won't interfere with what I have to say to you. I first took you to Grosvenor Square, didn't I?"

"You were so kind," he admitted.

"Now I come to think of it," she reflected, "I remember thinking it strange at the time that, though I couldn't induce you to go anywhere else, or meet any one else, you never hesitated about making Reginald's acquaintance."

"He was your brother, you see," David reminded her.

"It didn't occur to me," she replied drily, "that that was the reason. However, what I want to say to you is this, in bald words—don't lend him money."

David looked once more across the tops of the trees.

"I gather that the Marquis, then, is impecunious?" he said.

"Reginald hasn't a shilling," the Duchess declared earnestly. "Let me just tell you how they live. Letitia has two thousand a year, and so has Margaret, from their mother. Margaret's husband, who is a decent fellow, won't touch her money and makes her an allowance, so that nearly all her two thousand, and all of Letitia's, except the few ha'pence she spends on clothes, go to keeping an establishment together. Reginald has sold every scrap of land he could, years ago. Mandeleys is the only estate he has left, and there isn't a square yard of that that isn't mortgaged to the very fullest extent. It's always a scramble between his poor devils of lawyers and himself, whether there's a little margin to be got out of the rents after paying the interest. If there is, it goes, I believe, towards satisfying the claims of a lady down at Battersea."

"A lady down at Battersea," David replied. "Is it—may I ask—an old attachment?"

"A very old one indeed," the Duchess replied, "and, to tell you the truth, it's one of the most reputable things I know connected with Reginald. He is inconstant in everything else he does, and without being in any way wilfully dishonest, he is absolutely unreliable. But this lady at Battersea—she belonged to one of his tenants or something—I forget the story—has kept him within reasonable bounds for more years than I should like to say— What do you see over there, Mr. Thain?" she broke off suddenly, following his steadfast gaze.

David dropped his eyes from the clouds. His fingers relaxed their nervous clutch of the sides of his chair.

"Nothing," he answered. "I am interested. Please go on."

"Reginald has stuck at nothing to get money," the Duchess continued. "He has been on the board of any company willing to pay him a few guineas for his name. I believe things have come to such a pitch in that direction that the most foolhardy investor throws the prospectus away if his name is on it. He has drained his relatives dry. And yet, if you can reconcile all these things, he is, in his way, the very soul of honour. Now, having told you this, you can do as you please. If you lend him money, you'll probably never get it back. If you've any to chuck away, I can show you a hundred deserving charities. Reginald without money is really a harmless and extraordinarily amusing person. Reginald in search of money is the most dangerous person I know. That is what I wanted to tell you, and if you like now you can run away. My hairdresser is waiting for me, and he is just a little more independent than my chef. Stop, though, there's one thing more."

The Duchess had rung a bell with her foot, and a servant was waiting at the windows to show David out. The latter turned back.

"You are not making a fool of yourself with Letitia, are you?"

David was very white and cold for a moment. He looked his hostess in the face, and, as she expressed it afterwards, froze her up.

"I am afraid that I do not understand you, Duchess," he said.

"Oh, don't be silly!" she replied. "Remember that I am your oldest friend in this country, and I say what I like to everybody. You avoid most women as you would the plague—most women except Letitia. I've warned you against the father. Now I am warning you against the daughter. And then you can go and lose your heart to one and lend a million to the other, if you want. Letitia, for all her apparent amiability, is the proudest girl I ever knew. I hope you understand me?"

"Perfectly!"

"Letitia will marry for money, all right," her aunt continued. "She understands that that is her duty, and she will do it. But it will be some one—you will forgive me, Mr. Thain—with kindred associations, shall I say? Letitia, fortunately, takes after her father. She has no temperament, but a sense of family tradition which will give her all the backbone she needs."

"Is there any other member of the family," David began—

"Don't be a silly boy," the Duchess interrupted, "because that's what you are, really, in this world and amongst our stupid class of people. You are just as nice as can be, though. Run along, and don't forget that you are coming to dine on Friday. You'll meet the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he's going to try and persuade you to settle down here, for the sake of your income tax."

"Another plunderer!" David groaned. "I am beginning to feel rather like a lamb with an exceedingly long fleece."

"You would look better with your hair cut," the Duchess remarked, as she waved her hand. "Try that place at the bottom of Bond Street. The Duke always goes there. A Mr. Saunders is his man. Better ask for him. You'll find him at the top end of the room."

CHAPTER XIII

There was just one drop of alloy in the perfect contentment with which the Marquis contemplated his new prospects, and that was contained in a telephone message from Mr. Wadham, Junior, which he received upon the afternoon of David's call upon the Duchess.

"I must apologise for troubling your lordship," Mr. Wadham began. "I know your objection to the telephone, but in this instance it was quite impossible to send a message."

"I accept your apology and am listening," the Marquis declared graciously. "Be so good as to speak quite slowly, and don't mumble."

Mr. Wadham, Junior, cleared his throat before continuing. He was a little proud of his voice, although its rise and fall was perhaps more satisfactory from the point of view of a Chancery Court than from one who expected to gather the sense of every syllable.

"I am ringing up your lordship," he continued, "concerning the large batch of shares in the Pluto Oil Company of Arizona, which you entrusted to us for safe keeping, and for deposit with the bank against the advance required last Monday."

"I can hear you perfectly," the Marquis acknowledged suavely. "Pray continue."

"Your lordship's bankers sent for me this morning," Mr. Wadham went on, "in connection with these shares. They thought it their duty to point out, either through us or by communication with you direct, that according to the advice of a most reliable broker, their commercial value is practically nil."

"Is what?" the Marquis demanded.

"Nil—nix—not worth a cent," Mr. Wadham, Junior, proclaimed emphatically.

The Marquis, in that slang phraseology which he would have been the first to decry, never turned a hair. He had not the least intention, moreover, of permitting his interlocutor at the other end of the telephone even a momentary sensation of triumph.

"You can present my compliments to the manager," he said, "and tell him that the value of the shares in question does not concern either him or his brokers. In any case, they could not possibly have any information concerning the company, as it is only just registered and has not yet commenced operations. You understand me, Mr. Wadham?"

"Perfectly, your lordship," was the smooth reply. "The fact remains, however, that the brokers do know something about the company and the persons interested in it, and that knowledge, I regret to say, is most unfavourable. We felt it our duty, therefore, to pass on these facts."

"I am exceedingly obliged to you for your anxieties on my behalf," the Marquis declared. "My legal interests are, I am quite sure, safe in your hands. My financial affairs—my outside financial affairs, that is to say—I prefer to keep under my own control. I might remind you that these shares are supported, and came into my hands, in fact, through the agency of Mr. David Thain, the great financier."

There was a moment's pause.

"I had not forgotten the fact," Mr. Wadham admitted diffidently, "and it certainly seems improbable that Mr. Thain would introduce a risky investment to your lordship within a few weeks of his arrival in this country. At the same time, we feel compelled, of course, to bring to your notice the broker's report."

"Quite so," the Marquis acquiesced. "Kindly let the people concerned know that I am acting in this matter upon special information. Good-day, Mr. Wadham. My compliments to your father."

So the conversation terminated, but the Marquis for the remainder of that day felt as though just the shadow of a cloud rested upon his happiness. Twice he stared at the address of David's rooms, which occupied a prominent place upon his study table, but on both occasions he resisted the impulse to seek him out and obtain the reassurance he needed. He buried himself instead in a Review.

Letitia came in to see him on the way back from her aunt's tea party. The Marquis carefully made a note of his place and laid down his periodical.

"You found your aunt well, I trust, dear?"

"Oh, she was all right," Letitia replied. "She had an irritating lot of callers there, though."

Her father nodded sympathetically.

"The extraordinary habit which people in our rank of life seem to have developed lately for making friends outside their own sphere is making Society very difficult," he declared. "Members of our own family are, I am afraid, amongst the transgressors. Whom did you meet this afternoon?"

Letitia mentioned a few names listlessly.

"And Mr. Thain," she concluded.

Her father betrayed his interest.

"Mr. Thain was there, eh? I understood that he was much averse to paying calls."

"He looked as though he had been roped in," Letitia observed, "and aunt was all over herself, apologising to him for having other people there. She wanted to consult him, it seems, about something or other, and she turned him over to me until she was ready."

"And you," the Marquis enquired, with questioning sympathy, "were perhaps bored?"

"Not bored, exactly—rather irritated! I think I am like you, in some respects, father," Letitia went on, smoothing out her gloves. "I prefer to find my intimates within the circle of our own relatives and connections. A person like Mr. Thain in some way disturbs me."

"That," the Marquis regretted, "is unfortunate, as he is likely to be our neighbour at Mandeleys."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Oh, it is of no consequence," she replied. "I shall never feel the slightest compunction in anything I might do or say to him. If he pays more for Broomleys than it is worth, he has the advantage of our countenance, which I imagine, to a person in his position, makes the bargain equal. Mr. Thain does not seem to me to be one of those men who would part with anything unless he got some return."

"Money, nowadays," the Marquis reflected, pressing the tips of his fingers together, "is a marvellously revitalising influence. People whose social position is almost, if not quite equal to our own, have even taken it into the family through marriage."

Letitia's very charming mouth twitched. Her lips parted, and she laughed softly. Nothing amused her more than this extraordinary blindness of her father to actual facts—such, for instance, as the Lees' woollen mills!

"I do hope," she remarked, "that you are not thinking of offering me up, dad, on the altar of the God of Dollars?"

"My dear child," the Marquis protested, "I can truthfully and proudly say that I am acquainted with no young woman of your position in connection with whom such a suggestion would be more sacrilegious. I have sometimes hoped," he went on, "that matters were already on the eve of settlement in another direction."

"I don't know, I'm sure," Letitia answered thoughtfully. "I sometimes think that I have a great many more feelings, dad, than the sole remaining daughter of the Right Honourable Reginald Thursford, Marquis of Mandeleys, ought to possess. The fact is, there are times when I can't stand Charlie anywhere near me, and as to discussing any subject of reasonable interest, well, he can only see anything from his own point of view, and that is always wrong."

"You and he, then," the Marquis observed, "appear to share—or rather to possess every essential for domestic happiness. The constant propinquity in which married people of the middle and lower classes are forced to live is no doubt responsible, in many cases, for the early termination of their domestic happiness."

"I always thought the middle classes were horribly virtuous," Letitia yawned. "However!—Thursday night, dad. You are dining out, aren't you?"

"Thursday night," the Marquis repeated, telling for the hundredth time, with bland ease, the falsehood which had almost ceased to have even the intention to deceive. "Yes, I dine at my club to-night, dear."

She bent over and kissed his forehead.

"Remember, my dear," he enjoined, "that I do not wish you to develop any feelings of positive dislike towards Mr. Thain. Such people have their uses in the world. We must not forget that."

Letitia laughed at him understandingly, but she closed the door in silence.

CHAPTER XIV

Marcia, more especially perhaps during these later days, felt her sense of humour gently excited every time she crossed the threshold of Trewly's Restaurant. The programme which followed was always the same. The Marquis rose from a cushioned seat in the small entrance lounge to greet her, very distinguished looking in his plain dinner clothes, his black stock, vainly imitated by the younger generation, his horn-rimmed eyeglass, his cambric-fronted shirt with the black pearls, which had been the gift of the Regent to his great-grandfather. The head waiter, and generally the manager, hovered in the background while their greetings were exchanged and Marcia's coat delivered to the care of an attendant. Then they were shown with much ceremony to the same table which they had occupied on these weekly celebrations for many years. It was in a corner of the room, a corner which formed a slight recess, and special flowers, the gift of the management, were invariably in evidence. The rose-shaded lamp, with its long, silken hangings, was arranged at precisely the right angle. The Marquis asked his usual question and waved away the menu.

"What you choose to offer us, Monsieur Herbrand," he would say, in his old-world but perfect French. "If Madame has any fancy, we will send you a message."

So the meal commenced. Trewly's was a restaurant with a past. In the days of the Marquis's youth, when such things were studied more carefully than now, it was the one first-class restaurant in London to which the gilded youth of the aristocracy, and perhaps their sires, might indulge in the indiscretion of entertaining a young lady from the Italian chorus without fear of meeting staider relatives. The world of bohemian fashion had changed its laws since those days, and Trewly's had been left, high and dry, save for a small clientele who remembered its former glories and esteemed its cellar and cuisine. It belonged to the world which the Marquis knew, the world whose maxims he still recognised. After all these years, he would still have thought himself committing a breach of social etiquette if he had invited Marcia to lunch with him at the Ritz or the Carlton.

They drank claret, decanted with zealous care and served by a black-aproned cellarman, who waited anxiously by until the Marquis had gravely sipped his first glassful and approved. Their dinner to-day was very much what it had been a dozen years ago—the French-fed chicken, the artichokes, and strawberries served with liqueurs remained, whatever the season. And their conversations. Marcia leaned back in her chair for a moment, and again the corners of her lips twitched as she remembered. Faithfully, year after year, she could trace those conversations—the courtly, old-fashioned criticism of the events of the week, criticism from the one infallible standard, the standard of the immutable Whiggism upon which the constitution itself rested; conversation with passing references to any new event in art, and, until lately, the stage. To-night Marcia found herself tracing the gradual birth of her stimulating rebellion. She remembered how, years ago, she had sat in that same seat and listened as one might listen to the words of a god. And then came the faint revolt, the development of her intellect, the necessity for giving tongue to those more expansive and more subtle views of life which became her heritage. To do him justice, the Marquis encouraged her. He was as good a judge of wit and spirit as he was of claret. If Marcia had expressed a single sentence awkwardly, if her grammar had ever been at fault, her taste to be questioned, he would have relapsed into the stiffness of his ordinary manner, and she would have felt herself tongue-tied. But, curious though it seemed to her when she looked back, she was forced to realise that it was he who had always encouraged the birth of her new thoughts, her new ideals, her new outlook upon life, her own drastic and sometimes unanswerable criticisms of that state of life in which he lived. She represented modernity, seeking for expression in the culture of the moment. He, remaining of the ancient world, yet found himself rejuvenated, mentally refreshed, week by week, preserved from that condition of obstinate ossification into which he would otherwise have fallen, by this brilliant and unusual companionship. In all the many years of their intimacy he had felt no doubts concerning her. He was possessed of a self-confidence wholly removed from conceit, which had spared for him the knowledge of even a moment's jealousy. In her company he had felt the coming and, as he now realised, the passing of middle age. It was only within these last few hours that certain formless apprehensions had presented themselves to him.

"You drink your wine slowly to-night," she observed. "I was just thinking how delicious it was."

He touched the long forefinger of his left hand, just a little swollen.

"A touch of gout," he said, "come to remind me, I suppose, that however much we set our faces against it, change does exist. You are the only person, Marcia, who seems to defy it."

She laughed at him, but not with entire naturalness. He found himself studying her, during the next few moments. Just as he was a celebrated connoisseur of objets d'arts, a valued visitor to Christie's, although his purchases were small, so he was, in his way, an excellent judge of the beautiful in living things. He realised, as he studied her, that Marcia had only more fully developed the charm which had first attracted him. Her figure was a little rounder but it had lost none of its perfections. Her neck and throat were just as beautiful, and the success of her work, and her greater knowledge of life, had brought with them an assured and dignified bearing. There was not a vestige of grey in her soft brown hair, not a line in her face, nor any sign of the dentist's handiwork in her strong, white teeth. Only—was it his fancy, he wondered, or was there something missing from the way she looked at him?—a half shy, half baffled appeal for affection which had so often shone out upon him during these evenings, a wholly personal, wholly human note, the unspoken message of a woman to her lover. He asked himself whether that had gone, and, if it had, whether the companionship which remained sufficed.

"So the journey down to Mandeleys has not materialised yet?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"To tell you the truth," she told him, "I rather shrank from it. I could not seem to bring it into perspective—you know what I mean. How am I to go to him? I don't suppose he has changed. He is still splendidly faithful to the ideas of his earlier days. I do not suppose he has moved a step out of his groove. He is looking at the same things in the same way. Am I to go to him as a Magdalen, as a penitent? Honestly, Reginald, I couldn't play the part."

Their eyes met, and they both smiled.

"It is very difficult," he admitted, "to discuss or to hold in common a matter of importance with a person of another world. Why do you go?"

"Because," she replied, "he is, after all, my father; because I know that the pain and rage which he felt when he left England are there to-day, and I would like so much to make him see that they have all been wasted. I want him to realise that my life has been made, not spoilt."

"I should find out indirectly, if I were you, how he is feeling," the Marquis advised. "I rather agree with you that you will find him unchanged. His fierce opposition to my reasonable legal movements against him give one that impression."

"I shall probably be sorry I went," she admitted, "but it seems to me that it is one of those things which must be done. Let us talk of something else. Tell me how you have spent the week?"

"For one thing, I have improved my acquaintance with the American, David Thain, of whom I have already spoken to you," he told her.

"And your great financial scheme?"

"It promises well. Of course, if it is entirely successful, it will be like starting life all over again."

"There is a certain amount of risk, I suppose?" she asked, a little anxiously.

The Marquis waved his hand.

"In this affair quite negligible," he declared.

"It would make you very happy, of course, to free the estates," she ruminated.

The Marquis for a moment revealed a side of himself which always made Marcia feel almost maternal towards him.

"It would give me very great pleasure, also," he confessed, "to point out to my solicitors—to Mr. Wadham, Junior, especially—that the task which they have left unaccomplished for some twenty-five years I have myself undertaken successfully."

"This Mr. Thain must be rather interesting," Marcia said musingly. "Could you describe him?"

It was at that precise moment that the Marquis raised his head and discovered that David Thain was being shown by an obsequious maître d'hôtel to the table adjoining their own.

In the case of almost any other of his acquaintances, the Marquis's course of action would have been entirely simple. David, however, complicated things. With the naïve courtesy of his American bringing up, he no sooner recognised the Marquis than he approached the table and offered his hand.

"Good evening, Marquis," he said.

The Marquis shook hands. Some banalities passed between the two men. Then, as though for the first time, David was suddenly and vividly aware of Marcia's presence. Some instinct told him who she was, and for a moment he forgot himself. He looked at her steadily, curiously, striving to remember, and Marcia returned his gaze with a strange absorption which at first she failed to understand. This slim, nervous-looking man, with the earnest eyes and the slight stoop of the head, was bringing back to her some memory. From the first stage of the struggle her common sense was worsted. She was looking back down the avenues of her memory. Surely somewhere in that shadowland she had known some one with eyes like these!—there must be something to explain this queer sense of excitement. And then the Marquis, who had been deliberating, spoke the words which brought her to herself.

"Marcia, let me present to you Mr. David Thain, of whom we were speaking a few minutes ago. Mr. Thain, this is Miss Marcia Hannaway, whose very clever novel you may have read."

David's eyes were still eagerly fixed upon her face, but the introduction had brought Marcia back to the earth. There could be no connection between those half-formed memories and the American millionaire whose name was almost a household word!

"I am very pleased to meet you, Miss Hannaway," David said. "I was just telling the Marquis that I was surprised to find any one here whom I knew. I asked a friend to tell me of a restaurant near my rooms where I should meet no one, and he sent me here."

"Why such misanthropy?" she asked.

"It is my own bad manners," he explained. "I accepted an invitation for this evening, and found at the last moment so much work that I was obliged to send an excuse."

"You carry your work about with you, then?"

"Not always, I hope," he replied, "only I am just now clearing out a great many of my interests in America, and that alone is sufficient to keep one busy."

He passed on with a little bow, and took his place at the table which the maître d'hôtel had indicated. The Marquis, to whom his coming had been without any real significance, continued his conversation with Marcia until he found to his surprise that she was giving him less than her whole attention.

"What do you think of our hero of finance?" he enquired, a little coldly.

"He seems very much as you described him," Marcia answered. "To tell you the truth, his sudden appearance just as we were talking about him rather took my breath away."

"It was a coincidence, without doubt," the Marquis acknowledged.

Her eyes wandered towards the man who had given his brief order for dinner, and whose whole attention now seemed absorbed by the newspaper which he was reading.

"It is Mr. Thain, is it not, who introduced to you this wonderful speculation?" she asked, a little abruptly.

"That is so," the Marquis admitted. "I have always myself, however, been favourably disposed towards oil."

Marcia suddenly withdrew her glance, laughed softly to herself and sipped her wine.

"I was indulging in a ridiculous train of thought," she confessed. "Mr. Thain looks very clever, even if he is not exactly one's idea of an American financier. I expect the poor man does get hunted about. A millionaire, especially from foreign parts, has become a sort of Monte Cristo, nowadays."

The subject of David Thain dropped. The Marquis, as their coffee was brought, began to wonder dimly whether it was possible that the thread of their conversation was a little more difficult to hold together than in the past; whether that bridge between their interests and daily life became a little more difficult to traverse as the years passed. He fell into a momentary fit of silence. Marcia leaned towards him.

"Reginald," she said, "do you know, there was something I wanted to ask you this evening. Shall I ask it now?"

"If you will, dear."

She paused for a moment. The matter had seemed so easy and reasonable when she had revolved it in her mind, yet at this moment of broaching it, she realised, not for the first time, how different he was from other men; how difficult a nameless something about his environment made certain discussions. Nevertheless, she commenced her task.

"Reginald," she began, "do you realise that during the whole of my life I have never dined alone with any other man but you?"

"Nor I, since you came, with any other woman," he rejoined calmly. "You have some proposition to make?"

She was surprised to find that he had penetrated her thoughts.

"Don't you think, perhaps," she continued, "that we are a little too self-enclosing? Thanks to you, as I always remember, dear, the world has grown a larger place for me, year by year. At first I really tried to avoid friendships. I was perfectly satisfied. I did not need them. But my work, somehow, has made things different. It has brought me amongst a class of people who look upon freedom of intercourse between the sexes as a part of their everyday life. I found a grey hair in my head only the night before last, and do you know how it came? Just by refusing invitations from perfectly harmless people."

"I have never placed any restrictions upon your life," her companion reminded her.

"I know it," she admitted, "but, you see, the principal things between us have always been unspoken. I knew just how you felt about it. What I want to know is, now that the times have changed around you as well as around me, whether you would feel just the same if I, to take an example, were to lunch or dine with Mr. Borden, now and then, or with Morris Hyde, the explorer. I met him at an Authors' Club conversazione and he was immensely interesting. It struck me then that perhaps I was interpreting your wishes a little too literally."

The Marquis selected a cigarette from his battered gold case with its tiny coronet, tapped it upon the table and lit it. Marcia was already smoking.

"I fear that I am very old-fashioned in my notions, Marcia," he confessed. "I should find it very difficult to adapt myself to the perfectly harmless, I am sure, lack of restraint which, as you say, has opened the doors to a much closer friendship between men and women. The place which you have held in my life has grown rather than lessened with the years. It is only natural, however, that the opposite should be the case with you. I should like to consider what you have said, Marcia."

"You have meant so much to me," she continued, "you have been so much. In our earlier days, too, especially during that year when we travelled, you were such a wonderful mentor. It was your fine taste, Reginald, which enabled me to make the best of those months in Florence and Rome. You knew the best, and you showed it to me. You never tried to understand why it was the best, but you never made a mistake."

"Those things are matters of inheritance," he replied, "and cultivation. It was a great joy to me, Marcia, to give you the keys."

"Yes," she repeated, "that is what you did, Reginald—you gave me the keys, and I opened the doors."

"And now," he went on, "you have pushed your way further, much further into the world where men and women think, than I could or should care to follow you. Is it likely to separate us?"

She saw him suddenly through a little mist of tears.

"No!" she exclaimed, "it must not! It shall not!"

"Nevertheless," he persisted, "the thought is in your mind. I cannot alter my life, Marcia. I live to a certain extent by tradition, and by habits which have become too strong to break. There is a great difference in our years and in our outlook upon life. There is much before you, flowers which you may pick and heights which you may climb, which can have no message for me."

"Nothing," Marcia declared fervently, "shall disturb our—our friendship."

"That does not rest with you, dear, but rather with Fate," he replied. "You might control your actions, and I know that you would, but your will, your desires, your temperament, may still lead you in opposite directions. I have been your lover too long to slip easily into the place of your guardian. Hold out your hand, if you will, now, and bid me farewell. Try the other things, and, if they fail you, send for me."

"I shall do nothing of the sort," she objected. "We are both of us much too serious. The only question we are considering is whether you would object to my dining with Mr. Borden and lunching with Mr. Hyde?"

"It would give you an opportunity," he remarked, with a rather grim smile, "of seeing the inside of some other restaurant."

"How understanding you are!" she exclaimed. "Do you know, although I love our dinners here, I sometimes feel as though this room were a little cage, a little corner of the world across the threshold of which you had drawn a chalk line, so that no one of your world or mine might enter. The coming of Mr. Thain was almost like an earthquake."

With every moment it seemed to him that he understood her a little more, and with every moment the pain of it all increased.

"My dear Marcia," he said, "you have spoken the word. More than once lately I have fancied that I noticed indications of this desire on your part. I am glad, therefore, that you have spoken. Dine with your publisher, by all means, and lunch with Mr. Hyde. Take to yourself that greater measure of liberty which it is only too natural that you should covet. We will look upon it as a brief vacation, which certainly, after all these years, you have earned. When you have made up your mind, write to me. I shall await your letter with interest."

"But you mean that you are not coming down to see me before then?" she asked, a little tremulously.

"I think it would be better not," he decided. "I have kept you to myself very stringently, Marcia. You see, I recognise this, and I set you free for a time."

He paid the bill, and they left the room together.

"You are coming home?" she whispered, as they passed down the vestibule.

He shook his head.

"Not to-night, if you will excuse me, Marcia," he said. "The car is here. I will take a cab myself. There is a meeting of the committee at my club."

They were on the pavement. She gripped his hand.

"Do come," she begged.

He handed her in with a smile.

"You will go down to Battersea, James," he told the chauffeur, "and fetch me afterwards from the club."

A queer feeling caught at her heart as the car glided off and left him standing there, bareheaded. It was the first time—she felt something like the snap of a chain in her heart—the first time in all these years! Yet she never for a moment deceived herself. The tears which stood in her eyes, the pain in her heart, were for him.

CHAPTER XV

The Duchess, a few mornings later, leaned back in her car and watched the perilous progress of her footman, dodging in and out of the traffic in the widest part of Piccadilly. He returned presently in safety, escorting the object of his quest. The Duchess pointed to the seat by her side.

"Can I take you or drop you anywhere?" she asked. "Please don't look as though you had been taken into custody. I saw you in the distance, walking aimlessly along, and I really wanted to talk to you."

David for a moment indulged in the remains of what was almost a boyish resentment.

"I have to go to the Savoy," he explained, "and I was rather intending to walk across St. James's Park."

"You can walk after your lunch," she insisted. "If you walk before, it gives you too much of an appetite,—afterwards, it helps your digestion, so get in with me, and I will drive you to the Savoy."

He took his place by her side with a distinct air of resignation. The Duchess laughed at him.

"You are a very silly person to dislike other people so," she admonished. "If you begin to give way to misanthropy at your time of life, you will be a withered up old stick whom no one will want to be decent to, except to get money out of, before you're fifty. Don't you know that the society of human beings is good for you?"

"There isn't a medicine in the world one can't take too much of," David ventured, smiling in spite of himself.

"To the Savoy, John," his mistress directed. "Tell Miles to drive slowly. To abandon abstruse discussions," she continued, leaning back, "have you regarded my warning?"