Thorpe shook his head.

"What reminded me of him—there is an account in his Memoirs of how he felt when he first was given a command, at the beginning of the Civil War. He was looking about for the enemy, who was known to be in the vicinity, and the nearer he got to where this enemy probably was, the more he got timid and unnerved, he says, until it seemed as if cowardice were getting complete mastery of him. And then suddenly it occurred to him that very likely the enemy was just as afraid of him as he was of the enemy, and that moment his bravery all returned to him. He went in and gave the other man a terrible thrashing. It doesn't apply to your case, particularly—but I fancy that all really brave men have those inner convictions of weakness, even while they are behaving like lions. Those must have been extraordinarily interesting experiences of yours—on the plains. I wish I could have seen something of that part of America when I was there last year. Unfortunately, it didn't come my way."

"I thought I remembered your saying you'd been West."

Plowden smiled. "I'm afraid I did think it was West at the time. But since my return I've been warned that I mustn't call Chicago West. That was as far as I went. I had some business there, or thought I had. When my father died, that was in 1884, we found among his papers a lot of bonds of some corporation purporting to be chartered by the State of Illinois. Our solicitors wrote several letters, but they could find out nothing about them, and there the matter rested. Finally, last year, when I decided to make the trip, I recollected these old bonds, and took them with me. I thought they might at least pay my expenses. But it wasn't the least good. Nobody knew anything about them. It seems they related to something that was burned up in the Great Fire—either that, or had disappeared before that time. That fire seems to have operated like the Deluge—it cancelled everything that had happened previously. My unhappy father had a genius for that kind of investment. I shall have great pleasure in showing you tomorrow, a very picturesque and comprehensive collection of Confederate Bonds. Their face value is, as I remember it, eighty thousand dollars—that is, sixteen thousand pounds. I would entertain with joy an offer of sixteen shillings for the lot. My dear father bought them—I should not be surprised to learn that he bought them at a premium. If they ever touched a premium for a day, that is certainly the day that he would have hit upon to buy. Oh, it was too rare! Too inspired! He left nearly a hundred thousand pounds' worth of paper—that is, on its face—upon which the solicitors realized, I think it was thirteen hundred pounds. It's hard to imagine how he got them—but there were actually bonds among them issued by Kossuth's Hungarian Republic in 1848. Well—now you can see the kind of inheritance I came into, and I have a brother and sister more or less to look after, too."

Thorpe had been listening to these details with an almost exaggerated expression of sympathy upon his face. The voice in which he spoke now betrayed, however, a certain note of incredulity.

"Yes, I see that well enough," he remarked. "But what I don't perhaps quite understand—well, this is it. You have this place of yours in the country, and preserve game and so on—but of course I see what you mean. It's what you've been saying. What another man would think a comfortable living, is poverty to a man in your position."

"Oh, the place," said Plowden. "It isn't mine at all. I could never have kept it up. It belongs to my mother. It was her father's place; it has been in their family for hundreds of years. Her father, I daresay you know, was the last Earl of Hever. The title died with him. He left three daughters, who inherited his estates, and my mother, being the eldest, got the Kentish properties. Of course Hadlow House will come to me eventually, but it is hers during her lifetime. I may speak of it as my place, but that is merely a facon de parler; it isn't necessary to explain to everybody that it's my mother's. It's my home, and that's enough. It's a dear old place. I can't tell you how glad I am that you're going to see it."

"I'm very glad, too," said the other, with unaffected sincerity.

"All the ambitions I have in the world," the nobleman went on, sitting upright now, and speaking with a confidential seriousness, "centre round Hadlow. That is the part of me that I'm keen about. The Plowdens are things of yesterday. My grandfather, the Chancellor, began in a very small way, and was never anything more than a clever lawyer, with a loud voice and a hard heart, and a talent for money-making and politics. He got a peerage and he left a fortune. My father, for all he was a soldier, had a mild voice and a soft heart. He gave a certain military distinction to the peerage, but he played hell-and-tommy with the fortune. And then I come: I can't be either a Chancellor or a General, and I haven't a penny to bless myself with. You can't think of a more idiotic box for a man to be in. But now—thanks to you—there comes this prospect of an immense change. If I have money at my back—at once everything is different with me. People will remember then promptly enough that I am a Hadlow, as well as a Plowden. I will make the party whips remember it, too. It won't be a Secretary's billet in India at four hundred a year that they'll offer me, but a Governorship at six thousand—that is, if I wish to leave England at all. And we'll see which set of whips are to have the honour of offering me anything. But all that is in the air. It's enough, for the moment, to realize that things have really come my way. And about that—about the success of the affair—I suppose there can be no question whatever?"

"Not the slightest," Thorpe assured him. "Rubber Consols can go up to any figure we choose to name."

Lord Plowden proffered the cigar case again, and once more helped himself after he had given his companion a light. Then he threw himself back against the cushions, with a long sigh of content. "I'm not going to say another word about myself," he announced, pleasantly. "I've had more than my legitimate innings. You mustn't think that I forget for a moment the reverse of the medal. You're doing wonderful things for me. I only wish it were clearer to me what the wonderful things are that I can do for you."

"Oh, that'll be all right," said the other, rather vaguely.

"Perhaps it's a little early for you to have mapped out in your mind just what you want to do," Plowden reflected aloud. "Of course it has come suddenly upon you—just as it has upon me. There are things in plenty that we've dreamed of doing, while the power to do them was a long way off. It doesn't at all follow that these are the things we shall proceed to do, when the power is actually in our hands. But have you any plans at all? Do you fancy going into Parliament, for example?"

"Yes," answered Thorpe, meditatively. "I think I should like to go into Parliament. But that would be some way ahead. I guess I've got my plans worked out a trifle more than you think. They may not be very definite, as regards details, but their main direction I know well enough. I'm going to be an English country gentleman."

Lord Plowden visibly winced a little at this announcement. He seemed annoyed at the consciousness that he had done so, turning abruptly first to stare out of the window, then shifting his position on the seat, and at last stealing an uneasy glance toward his companion. Apparently his tongue was at a loss for an appropriate comment.

Thorpe had lost none of these unwilling tokens of embarrassment. Plowden saw that at once, but it relieved even more than it surprised him to see also that Thorpe appeared not to mind. The older man, indeed, smiled in good-natured if somewhat ironical comprehension of the dumb-show.

"Oh, that'll be all right, too," he said, with the evident intention of reassurance. "I can do it right enough, so far as the big things are concerned. It'll be in the little things that I'll want some steering."

"I've already told you—you may command me to the utmost of my power," the other declared. Upon reflection, he was disposed to be ashamed of himself. His nerves and facial muscles had been guilty of an unpardonable lapse into snobbishness—and toward a man, too, who had been capable of behaviour more distinguished in its courtesy and generosity than any he had encountered in all the "upper circles" put together. He recalled all at once, moreover, that Thorpe's "h's" were perfect—aud, for some occult reason, this completed his confusion.

"My dear fellow"—he began again, confronting with verbal awkwardness the other's quizzical smile—"don't think I doubt anything about you. I know well enough that you can do anything—be anything—you like."

Thorpe laughed softly.

"I don't think you know, though, that I'm a public-school man," he said.

Plowden lifted his brows in unfeigned surprise. "No—I didn't know that," he admitted, frankly.

"Yes, I'm a Paul's Pigeon," Thorpe went on, "as they called them in my day. That's gone out now, I'm told, since they've moved to the big buildings in Hammersmith. I did very well at school, too; came out in the first fourteen. But my father wouldn't carry the thing any further. He insisted on my going into the shop when I left St. Paul's and learning the book-business. He had precisely the same kind of dynastic idea, you know, that you fellows have. His father and his grand-father had been booksellers, and he was going to hand on the tradition to me, and my son after me. That was his idea. And he thought that Paul's would help this—but that Oxford would kill it.

"Of course, he was right there—but he was wrong in supposing there was a bookseller in me. I liked the books well enough, mind you—but damn the people that came to buy them, I couldn't stand it. You stood two hours watching to see that men didn't put volumes in their pockets, and at the end of that time you'd made a profit of ninepence. While you were doing up the parcel, some fellow walked off with a book worth eighteen-pence. It was too slow for me. I didn't hit it off with the old man, either. We didn't precisely quarrel, but I went off on my own hook. I hung about London for some years, trying this thing and that. Once I started a book-shop of my own—but I did no good here. Finally I turned it up altogether, and went to Australia. That was in 1882. I've been in almost every quarter of the globe since; I've known what it was to be shipwrecked in a monsoon, and I've lain down in a desert not expecting to get up again, with my belt tightened to its last hole for hunger—but I can't remember that I ever wished myself back in my father's book-shop."

Plowden's fine eyes sparkled his appreciation of the other's mood. He was silent for a moment, then lifted his head as if something had occurred to him. "You were speaking of the plan that you should succeed to your father's business—and your son after you—you're not married, are you?"

Thorpe slowly shook his head.

"Our station is the next," said the younger man. "It's a drive of something under two miles. You'd better light another cigar." He added, as if upon a casual afterthought: "We can both of us think of marrying now."



CHAPTER V

FOR the next two hours, Thorpe's thoughts were almost wholly occupied with various phases of the large subject of domestic service. He seemed suddenly to have been transported to some region populated exclusively by clean-shaven men in brown livery. One of these was holding a spirited horse outside the station, and when Lord Plowden had taken the reins, and Thorpe had gathered the rugs about his knees and feet, this menial silently associated himself with the young man who had accompanied them from town, on the back seat of the trap. With these people so close behind him, Thorpe felt that any intimate conversation was out of the question. Indeed, talk of any sort was not invited; the big horse burst forth with high, sprawling strides upon a career through the twilight, once the main road was reached, which it taxed all Plowden's energies to regulate. He kept up a continual murmuring monologue to the animal—"So—so—quiet, my pet,—so—so—easy, my beauty—-so—so"—and his wrists and gloved hands were visibly under a tremendous tension of strain, as they held their own against the rigid arched neck and mouth of steel. Thorpe kept a grip on the side of the trap, and had only a modified pleasure in the drive. The road along which they sped seemed, in the gathering dusk, uncomfortably narrow, and he speculated a good deal as to how frightened the two mutes behind him must be. But silence was such a law of their life that, though he strained his ears, he could not so much as hear them sigh or gasp.

It seemed but a very few minutes before they turned off, with but the most fleeting diminution of pace, upon a private road, which speedily developed into an avenue of trees, quite dark and apparently narrower than ever. Down this they raced precipitately, and then, coming out all at once upon an open space, swung smartly round the crescent of a gravel road, and halted before what seemed to be the door of a greenhouse. Thorpe, as he stood up in the trap, got an uncertain, general idea of a low, pale-coloured mansion in the background, with lights showing behind curtains in several widely separated windows; what he had taken to be a conservatory revealed itself now to be a glass gallery, built along the front of the central portion of this house.

A profusion of hospitable lights—tall wax-candles in brackets among the vines against the trellised wall—gave to this outlying entrance what the stranger felt to be a delightful effect. Its smooth tiled floor, comfortably bestrewn with rugs, was on a level with the path outside. There were low easy-chairs here, and a little wicker table bearing books and a lady's work-basket. Further on, giant chrysanthemum blooms were massed beneath the clusters of pale plumbago-flowers on the trellis. Directly in front, across the dozen feet of this glazed vestibule, the broad doorway of the house proper stood open—with warm lights glowing richly upon dark woods in the luxurious obscurity within.

What Thorpe noted most of all, however, was the servants who seemed to swarm everywhere. The two who had alighted from the trap had contrived somehow mysteriously to multiply themselves in the darkness. All at once there were a number of young men—at the horse's head, at the back and sides of the trap, at the first doorway, and the second, and beyond—each presenting such a smooth-faced, pallid, brown-clad replica of all the others that Thorpe knew he should never be able to tell them apart.

Lord Plowden paused for a moment under the candle-light to look at his watch. "We did it in a bit over eight minutes," he remarked, with obvious satisfaction. "With four people and heavy roads that's not so bad—not so bad. But come inside."

They moved forward through the wide doorway into an apartment the like of which Thorpe had not seen before. It was a large, square room, with a big staircase at the end, which separated and went off to right and left, half-way up its visible course. Its floor was of inlaid woods, old and uneven from long use, and carpeted here and there by the skins of tigers and leopards. There were many other suggestions of the chase about the room: riding boots, whips, spurs, and some stands of archaic weapons caught the eye at various points; the heads of foxes and deer peeped out on the blackened panels of the walls, from among clusters of hooks crowded with coats, hats, and mackintoshes. At the right, where a fire glowed and blazed under a huge open chimney-place, there were low chairs and divans drawn up to mark off a space for orderly domestic occupation. The irregularity of every thing outside—the great table in the centre of the hall strewn with an incongruous litter of caps, books, flasks, newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches; the shoes, slippers, and leggings scattered under the benches at the sides—all this self-renewing disorder of a careless household struck Thorpe with a profound surprise. It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch—and to find it in the ancestral home of an English nobleman, filled to overflowing with servants, amazed him.

The glances that he cast about him, however, were impassive enough. His mind was charged with the ceaseless responsibility of being astonished at nothing. A man took his hat, and helped him off with his coat. Another moved toward the staircase with his two bags.

"If you will follow Pangbourn," said his host, indicating this second domestic, "he will look after you. You would like to go up and change now, wouldn't you? There's a fire in your room."

Thus dismissed, he went up the stairs in the wake of his portmanteaus, taking the turning to the left, and then proceeding by a long, low passage, round more than one corner, to what he conceived to be a wing of the house. The servant ushered him into a room—and, in despite of himself, he sighed with pleasure at the sight of it. The prettiest and most charming of rooms it seemed to him to be—spacious and quaintly rambling in shape, with a delicately-figured chintz repeating the dainty effects of the walls upon the curtains and carpet and bed-hangings and chair-covers, and with a bright fire in the grate throwing its warm, cozy glow over everything. He looked at the pictures on the walls, at the photographs and little ornaments on the writing desk, and the high posts and silken coverlet of the big bed, and, secure in the averted face of the servant, smiled richly to himself.

This servant, kneeling, had unstrapped and opened the new bags. Thorpe looked to see him quit the room, this task accomplished, and was conscious of something like dismay at the discovery that he intended to unpack them as well. Pangbourn began gravely to unwrap one paper parcel after another and to assort their contents in little heaps on the sofa beside him. He did it deftly, imperturbably, as if all the gentlemen he had ever seen carried their belongings in packages done up by tradesmen.

Thorpe's impulse to bid him desist framed itself in words on the tip of his tongue—but he did not utter these words. After circling idly, hands in pockets, about the man and the bags for a little time, he invented something which it seemed better for him to say.

"I don't know what you'll be able to make of those things," he remarked, casually. "My man has been buying them today—and I don't know what he mayn't have forgotten. My whole outfit of that sort of thing went astray or was stolen at some station or other—the first part of the week—I think it must have been Leeds."

"Yes, sir," said Pangbourn, without emotion. "They're very careless, sir."

He went on impassively, shaking out the black garments and spreading them on the bed, laying out a shirt and tie beside them, and arranging the razors, strop, and brushes on the dressing-table. He seemed to foresee everything—for there was not an instant's hesitation in the clock-like assiduity of his movements, as he bestowed handkerchiefs, in one drawer, socks in another, hung pyjamas before the fire, and set the patent-leather pumps against the fender. Even the old Mexican shooting-suit seemed in no way to disconcert him. He drew forth its constituent elements as with a practised hand; when he had hung them up, sombrero and all, in the wardrobe against the wall, they had the trick of making that venerable oaken receptacle look as if it had been fashioned expressly for them.

Thorpe's earlier uneasiness quite lost itself in his admiration for Pangbourn's resourceful dexterity. The delighted thought that now he would be needing a man like this for himself crossed his mind. Conceivably he might even get this identical Pangbourn—treasure though he were. Money could command everything on this broad globe—and why not Pangbourn? He tentatively felt of the coins in his pocket, as it became apparent that the man's task was nearing completion—and then frowned at himself for forgetting that these things were always reserved for the end of a visit.

"Will you dress now, sir?" asked Pangbourn. His soft, distinct enunciation conveyed the suggestion of centuries of training.

"Eh?" said Thorpe, finding himself for the moment behind the other's thought.

"Shall you require me any further, sir?" the man reframed the question, deferentially.

"Oh! Oh—no," replied Thorpe. "No—I'll get along all right."

Left to himself, he began hurriedly the task of shaving and dressing. The candles on either side of the thick, bevelled swinging mirror presented a somewhat embarrassing contrast to the electric light he was used to—but upon second thought he preferred this restrained aristocratic glimmer.

He had completed his toilet, and was standing at the bay-window, with his shoulder holding back the edge of the curtain, looking out upon the darkened lawn and wondering whether he ought to go downstairs or wait for someone to summon him, when he heard a knock at his door. Before he could answer, the door opened, and he made out in the candle-and firelight that it was Lord Plowden who had come in. He stepped forward to meet his host who, clad now in evening-clothes, was smoking a cigarette.

"Have they looked after you all right?" said Plowden, nonchalantly. "Have a cigarette before we go down? Light it by the candle. They never will keep matches in a bedroom."

He seated himself in an easy-chair before the fire, as he spoke, and stretched out his shining slippers toward the grate. "I thought I'd tell you before we went down"—he went on, as Thorpe, with an elbow on the mantel, looked down at his handsome head—"my sister has a couple of ladies visiting her. One of them I think you know. Do you remember on shipboard a Miss Madden—an American, you know—very tall and fine, with bright red hair—rather remarkable hair it was?"

"I remember the lady," said Thorpe, upon reflection, "but we didn't meet." He could not wholly divest his tone of the hint that in those days it by no means followed that because he saw ladies it was open to him to know them.

Lord Plowden smiled a little. "Oh, you'll like her. She's great fun—if she's in the mood. My mother and sister—I had them call on her in London last spring—and they took a great fancy to her. She's got no end of money, you know—at least a million and a half—dollars, unfortunately. Her parents were Irish—her father made his pile in the waggon business, I believe—but she's as American as if they'd crossed over in—what was it, the 'Sunflower'?—no, the 'Mayflower.' Marvelous country for assimilation, that America is! You remember what I told you—it's put such a mark on you that I should never have dreamt you were English."

Thorpe observed his companion, through a blue haze of smoke, in silence. This insistence upon the un-English nature of the effect he produced was not altogether grateful to his ears.

"The other one," continued Plowden, "is Lady Cressage. You'll be interested in her—because a few years ago she was supposed to be the most beautiful woman in London. She married a shocking bounder—he would have been Duke of Glastonbury, though, if he had lived—but he was drowned, and she was left poor as a church mouse. Oh! by the way!" he started up, with a gleam of aroused interest on his face—"it didn't in the least occur to me. Why, she's a daughter of our General Kervick. How did he get on the Board, by the way? Where did you pick him up?"

Thorpe bent his brows in puzzled lines. "Why, you introduced me to him yourself, didn't you?" he asked, slowly.

Plowden seemed unaffectedly surprised at the suggestion, as he turned it over in his mind. "By George! I think you're right," he said. "I'd quite forgotten it. Of course I did. Let me see—oh yes, I reconstruct it readily enough now. Poor old chappie—he needs all he can get. He was bothering her about money—that was it, I remember now—but what an idiot I was to forget it. But what I was saying—there's no one else but my mother and sister, and my brother Balder. He's a youngster—twenty or thereabouts—and he purports to be reading for his exams for the Army. If they opened his head, though, I doubt if they'd find anything but cricket and football, unless it might be a bit of golf. Well—that's the party. I thought you might like to have a notion of them in advance. If you've finished your cigarette"—he threw his own into the grate, and rose as he spoke—"we may as well be moving along. By the way," he concluded, as they walked toward the door, "I've an idea that we won't say anything, just at the moment, about our great coup. I should like to keep it as a little surprise—for my mother and sister, you know."

Some two hours later, Thorpe found the leisure and the restored equanimity needful for a dispassionate survey of his surroundings. He had become temporarily detached from the group over by the fireplace in the big drawing-room and was for the first time that evening very much at his ease. It was all much simpler, upon experiment, than he had feared. He stood now in a corner of the ornate apartment, whither he had wandered in examining the pictures on the walls, and contemplated with serenity the five people whom he had left behind him. He was conscious of the conviction that when he rejoined them, it would be on a new footing of assured equality. He knew now the exact measure of everything.

The Hon. Balder Plowden—a tall, heavily-built youth, with enormous shoulders and thick, hard hands, and pale straw-coloured hair and brows and eyelashes—had amiably sauntered beside him, and was elucidating for his benefit now, in slow, halting undertones, some unfathomable mystery connected with the varying attitude of two distinct breeds of terriers toward rats. Across the room, just within reach of the flickering ruddy firelight from the hearth, the American guest, Miss Madden, was seated at the piano, playing some low and rather doleful music. Thorpe bent his head, and assumed an air of attention, but in truth he listened to neither the Honourable Balder nor the piano. His thoughts were concentrated jealously upon his own position in this novel setting. He said to himself that it was all right. Old Lady Plowden had seemed to like him from the start. The genial, if somewhat abstracted, motherliness of her welcome had been, indeed, his sheet anchor throughout the evening. She had not once failed to nod her head and smile and twinkle her little kind eyes through their spectacles at him, whenever by word or look he had addressed her. Nor did his original half-suspicion, that this was her manner to people in general, justify itself upon observation. She was civil, even excessively civil, to the other two guests, but these ladies did not get the same eager and intent smile that he could command. He reasoned it out that Plowden must have said something pleasant to his mother about him—perhaps even to the point of explaining that he was to be the architect of their fortunes—but he did not like to ascribe all her hospitable warmth to that. It was dear to him to believe that she liked him on his own merits—and he did believe it, as his softened glance rested upon her where she sat almost facing him in her padded, wicker chair—small, white-haired, rosy-cheeked, her intelligent face radiating a kind of alert placidity which somehow made him feel at home.

He had not been as much at home with the others. The Honourable Balder, of course, didn't count; nobody paid attention to him, and least of all a busy Rubber King. He gave not much more heed to the American—the tall young woman with the red hair and the million and a half of dollars. She was plainly a visitor like himself, not at all identified with the inner life of the household. He fancied, moreover, that she in no way desired to be thus identified. She seemed to carry herself with a deliberate aloofness underlying her surface amiability. Then he had spoken his few words with her, once or twice, he had got this effect of stony reserve close beneath her smile and smooth words. True, this might mean only that she felt herself out of her element, just as he did—but to him, really it did not matter what she felt. A year ago—why, yes, even a fortnight ago—the golden rumour of millions would have shone round her auburn hair in his eyes like a halo. But all that was changed. Calculated in a solidified currency, her reported fortune shrank to a mere three hundred thousand pounds. It was a respectable sum for a woman to have, no doubt, but it did nothing to quicken the cool indifference with which he considered her.

The two other young women were different. They were seated together on a sofa, so placed as regarded his point of view, that he saw only in part the shadowed profiles of the faces they turned toward the piano. Although it was not visible to him, the posture of their shoulders told him that they were listening to the music each holding the other's hand. This tacit embrace was typical in his mind of the way they hung together, these two young women. It had been forced upon his perceptions all the evening, that this fair-haired, beautiful, rather stately Lady Cressage, and the small, swarthy, round-shouldered daughter of the house, peering through her pince-nez from under unduly thick black brows, formed a party of their own. Their politeness toward him had been as identical in all its little shades of distance and reservation as if they had been governed from a single brain-centre. It would be unfair to them to assume from their manner that they disliked him, or were even unfavourably impressed by him. The finesse of that manner was far too delicate a thing to call into use such rough characterizations. It was rather their action as a unit which piqued his interest. He thought he could see that they united upon a common demeanour toward the American girl, although of course they knew her much better than they knew him. It was not even clear to him that there were not traces of this combination in their tone toward Plowden and the Honourable Balder. The bond between them had twisted in it strands of social exclusiveness, and strands of sex sympathy.

He did not analyze all this with much closeness in his thoughts, but the impressions of it were distinct enough to him. He rather enjoyed these impressions than otherwise. Women had not often interested him consecutively to any large degree, either in detail or as a whole. He had formulated, among other loose general notions of them, however, the idea that their failure to stand by one another was one of their gravest weaknesses. This proposition rose suddenly now in his mind, and claimed his attention. It became apparent to him, all at once, that his opinions about women would be henceforth invested with a new importance. He had scarcely before in his life worn evening dress in a domestic circle which included ladies—certainly never in the presence of such certificated and hall-marked ladies as these. His future, however, was to be filled with experiences of this nature. Already, after this briefest of ventures into the new life, he found fresh conceptions of the great subject springing up in his thoughts. In this matter of women sticking together, for example—here before his eyes was one of the prettiest instances of it imaginable. As he looked again at the two figures on the sofa, so markedly unlike in outward aspect, yet knit to each other in such a sisterly bond, he found the spectacle really touching.

Lady Cressage had inclined her classic profile even more toward the piano. Thorpe was not stirred at all by the music, but the spirit of it as it was reflected upon this beautiful facial outline—sensitive, high-spirited, somewhat sad withal—appealed to something in him. He moved forward cautiously, noiselessly, a dozen restricted paces, and halted again at the corner of a table. It was a relief that the Honourable Balder, though he followed along, respected now his obvious wish for silence. But neither Balder nor anyone else could guess that the music said less than nothing to his ears—that it was the face that had beckoned him to advance.

Covertly, with momentary assurances that no one observed him, he studied this face and mused upon it. The white candle-light on the shining wall beyond threw everything into a soft, uniform shadow, this side of the thread of dark tracery which outlined forehead and nose and lips and chin. It seemed to him that the eyes were closed, as in reverie; he could not be sure.

So she would have been a Duchess if her husband had lived! He said to himself that he had never seen before, or imagined, a face which belonged so indubitably beneath a tiara of strawberry leaves in diamonds. The pride and grace and composure, yes, and melancholy, of the great lady—they were all there in their supreme expression. And yet—why, she was no great lady at all. She was the daughter of his old General Kervick—the necessitous and haughtily-humble old military gentleman, with the grey moustache and the premature fur coat, who did what he was told on the Board without a question, for a pitiful three hundred a year. Yes—she was his daughter, and she also was poor. Plowden had said so.

Why had Plowden, by the way, been so keen about relieving her from her father's importunities? He must have had it very much at heart, to have invented the roundabout plan of getting the old gentleman a directorship. But no—there was nothing in that. Why, Plowden had even forgotten that it was he who suggested Kervick's name. It would have been his sister, of course, who was evidently such chums with Lady Cressage, who gave him the hint to help the General to something if he could. And when you came to think of it, these aristocrats and military men and so on, had no other notion of making money save by directorships. Clearly, that was the way of it. Plowden had remembered Kervick's name, when the chance arose to give the old boy a leg up, and then had clean forgotten the circumstance. The episode rather increased his liking for Plowden.

He glanced briefly, under the impulse of his thought, to where the peer sat, or rather sprawled, in a big low chair before the fire. He was so nearly recumbent in it, indeed, that there was nothing to be seen of him but an elbow, and two very trim legs extended to the brass fender. Thorpe's gaze reverted automatically to the face of General Kervick's daughter. He wondered if she knew about the Company, and about him, and about his ability to solidify to any extent her father's financial position. Even more, upon reflection, he wondered whether she was very fond of her father; would she be extremely grateful to one who should render him securely comfortable for life? Miss Madden rose from the piano before Thorpe noted that the music had ceased. There came from the others a soft but fervent chorus of exclamations, the sincerity and enthusiasm of which made him a little ashamed. He had evidently been deaf to something that deeply moved the rest. Even Balder made remarks which seemed to be regarded as apposite.

"What IS it?" asked Lady Cressage, with obvious feeling. "I don't know when anything has touched me so much."

"Old Danish songs that I picked up on the quai in Paris for a franc or two," replied Miss Madden. "I arranged and harmonized them—and, oddly enough, the result is rather Keltic, don't you think?"

"We are all of us Kelts in our welcome to music—and musicians—like this," affirmed Lord Plowden, who had scrambled to his feet.

With sudden resolution, Thorpe moved forward and joined the conversation.



CHAPTER VI

THORPE'S life-long habit of early rising brought him downstairs next morning before anybody else in the house, apparently, was astir. At all events, he saw no one in either the hall or the glass vestibule, as he wandered about. Both doors were wide open, however, to the mild, damp morning air. He found on one of the racks a cap that was less uncomfortable than the others, and sauntered forth to look about him.

His nerves were by no means in so serene a state as his reason told him they ought to be. The disquieting impression of bad dreams hung about him. The waking hour—always an evil time for him in these latter days of anxiety—had been this morning a peculiarly depressing affair. It had seemed to him, in the first minutes of reviving consciousness, that he was a hopelessly ruined and discredited man; the illusion of disaster had been, indeed, so complete and vivid that, even now, more than an hour later, he had not shaken off its effects.

He applied his mental energies, as he strolled along the gravel paths, to the task of reassuring himself. There were still elements of chance in the game, of course, but it was easy enough, here in the daylight, to demonstrate that they had been cut down to a minimum—that it was nonsense to borrow trouble about them. He reviewed the situation in painstaking detail, and at every point it was all right, or as nearly all right as any human business could be. He scolded himself sharply for this foolish susceptibility to the intimidation of nightmares. "Look at Plowden!" he bade his dolorous spirit. "See how easy he takes things."

It was undeniable that Lord Plowden took things very easily indeed. He had talked with eloquence and feeling about the miseries and humiliations of a peerage inadequately endowed with money, but no traces of his sufferings were visible to Thorpe's observant eye. The nobleman himself looked the very image of contented prosperity—handsome, buoyant, light-hearted, and, withal, the best-groomed man in London. And this ancestral home of his—or of his mother's, since he seemed to insist upon the distinction—where were its signs of a stinted income? The place was overrun with servants. There was a horse which covered a distance of something like two miles in eight minutes. Inside and out, Hadlow House suggested nothing but assured plenty. Yet its master told the most unvarying tales of poverty, and no doubt they were in one sense true. What he wished to fix his mind upon, and to draw strength for himself from, was the gay courage with which these Plowdens behaved as if they were rich.

The grounds at the front of the house, hemmed in by high hedges and trees from what seemed to be a public road beyond, were fairly spacious, but the sleek decorum of their arrangement, while it pleased him, was scarcely interesting. He liked better to study the house itself, which in the daylight revealed itself as his ideal of what a historic English country-house of the minor class should be.

There had been a period in his youth when architecture had attracted him greatly as offering a congenial and lucrative career. Not much remained to him now of the classifications and phraseology which he had gone to the trouble of memorizing, in that far-off time, but he still looked at buildings with a kind of professional consciousness. Hadlow House said intelligible things to him, and he was pleased with himself for understanding them. It was not new in any part, apparently, but there was nothing pretentious in its antiquity. It had never been a castle, or a fortified residence. No violent alteration in habits or needs distinguished its present occupants from its original builders. It had been planned and reared as a home for gentle people, at some not-too-remote date when it was already possible for gentle people to have homes, without fighting to defend them. One could fancy that its calm and infinitely comfortable history had never been ruffled from that day to this. He recalled having heard it mentioned the previous evening that the house stood upon the site of an old monastery. No doubt that accounted for its being built in a hollow, with the ground-floor on the absolute level of the earth outside. The monks had always chosen these low-lying sheltered spots for their cloisters. Why should they have done so? he wondered—and then came to a sudden mental stop, absorbed in a somewhat surprised contemplation of a new version of himself. He was becoming literary, historical, bookish! His mind had begun to throw open again, to abstract thoughts and musings, its long-closed doors. He had read and dreamed so much as a lad, in the old book-shop! For many years that boyhood of eager concern in the printed page had seemed to him to belong to somebody else. Now, all at once, it came back to him as his own possession; he felt that he could take up books again where he had dropped them, perhaps even with the old rapt, intent zest.

Visions rose before him of the magnificent library he would gather for himself. And it should be in no wise for show—the gross ostentation of the unlettered parvenu—but a genuine library, which should minister to his own individual culture. The thought took instant hold upon his interest. By that road, his progress to the goal of gentility would be smooth and simple. He seemed not to have reasoned it out to himself in detail before, but now, at all events, he saw his way clearly enough. Why should he be tormented with doubts and misgivings about himself, as if he had come out of the gutter?

Why indeed? He had passed through—and with credit, too—one of the great public schools of England. He had been there on a footing of perfect equality, so far as he saw, with the sons of aristocratic families or of great City potentates. And as to birth, he had behind him three generations at least of scholarly men, men who knew the contents, as well as the commercial value, of the books they handled.

His grandfather had been a man of note in his calling. The tradition of Lord Althorp's confidence in him, and of how he requited it by securing Caxton's "Golden Legend" for the library of that distinguished collector, under the very nose of his hot rival, the Duke of Marlborough, was tenderly cherished as an heirloom in the old shop. And Thorpe's father, too, though no such single achievement crowned his memory, had been the adviser and, as one might say, the friend of many notable writers and patrons of literature. The son of such forbears needed only money to be recognized by everybody as a gentleman.

On his mother's side, now that he thought of it, there was something perhaps better still than a heritage of librarians' craft and tastes. His mother's maiden name was Stormont, and he remembered well enough the solemnity with which she had always alluded to the fact, in the course of domestic discussions. Who the Stormonts were he could not recall that he had ever learned, but his mother had been very clear indeed about their superiority to the usual ruck of people. He would ask his sister whether she knew anything about them. In the meantime there was no denying that Stormont was a fine-sounding name. He reflected that it was his own middle name—and, on the instant, fancy engraved for him a card-plate on which appeared the legend—"Mr. Stormont Thorpe."

It was an inspiration! "Joel" he had not used for so many years that now, after six months' familiarity with it on his sister's lips, he could not get accustomed to it. The colourless and non-committal style of "J. S. Thorpe," under which he had lived so long, had been well enough for the term of his exile—the weary time of obscure toil and suspense. But now, in this sunburst of smiling fortune, when he had achieved the right to a name of distinction—here it was ready to his hand. A fleeting question as to whether he should carry the "J" along as an initial put itself to his mind. He decided vigorously against it. He had always had a prejudice against men who, in the transatlantic phrase, parted either their hair or their names in the middle.

He had made his unheeding way past the house to the beginning of the avenue of trees, which he remembered from the previous evening's drive. To his right, an open space of roadway led off in the direction of the stables. As he hesitated, in momentary doubt which course to take, the sound of hoofs in the avenue caught his ear, and he stood still. In a moment there came into view, round a curve in the leafy distance, two horses with riders, advancing at a brisk canter. Soon he perceived that the riders were ladies; they drew rein as they approached him, and then it was to be seen that they were the pair he had judged to be such close friends last night—Lady Cressage and the daughter of the house.

They smiled and nodded down at him, as he lifted his cap and bowed. Their cheeks were glowing and their eyes sparkling with the exhilaration of their ride. Even the Hon. Winifred looked comely and distinguished in his eyes, under the charm of this heightened vivacity. She seemed to carry herself better in the saddle than she did out of it; the sweep of her habit below the stirrup lent dignity to her figure.

But her companion, whose big chestnut mount was pacing slowly toward the stepping-block—how should he bring within the compass of thought the impressions he had had of her as she passed? There seemed to have been no memory in his mind to prepare him for the beauty of the picture she had made. Slender, erect, exquisitely-tailored, she had gone by like some queen in a pageant, gracious yet unapproachable. He stared after her, mutely bewildered at the effect she produced upon him—until he saw that a groom had run from the stable-yard, and was helping the divinity to dismount. The angry thought that he might have done this himself rose within him—but there followed swiftly enough the answering conviction that he lacked the courage. He did not even advance to proffer his services to the other young lady, while there was still time. The truth was, he admitted ruefully to himself, they unnerved him.

He had talked freely enough to them, or rather to the company of which they made part, the previous evening. There had been an hour or more, indeed, before the party broke up, in which he had borne the lion's share of the talk—and they had appeared as frankly entertained as the others. In fact, when he recalled the circle of faces to which he had addressed his monologue of reminiscences—curious experiences and adventures in Java and the Argentine, in Brazil and the Antilles and Mexico and the far West—it was in the face of Lady Cressage that he seemed to discern the most genuine interest.

Why should she frighten him, then, by daylight? The whimsical theory that the wine at dinner had given him a spurious courage occurred to him. He shrugged his shoulders at it, and, with his hands in his pockets, turned toward the stables.

The stable-yard is, from some points of view, the prettiest thing about Hadlow. There is a big, uneven, grass-grown space, in the centre of which, from a slight mound, springs an aged oak of tremendous girth and height. All around this enclosure are buildings of the same pale yellowish brick as the mansion itself, but quaintly differing one from another in design and size. Stables, carriage-houses, kennels, a laundry, a brewery, and half a dozen structures the intention of which is now somewhat uncertain—some flat-topped, some gabled, others with turrets, or massive grouped chimneys, or overhanging timbered upper stories—form round this unkempt, shadowed green a sort of village, with a communal individuality of its own.

A glance shows its feudal relation to, and dependence upon, the great house behind which it nestles; some of the back-kitchens and offices of this great house, indeed, straggle out till they meet and merge themselves into this quadrangle. None the less, it presents to the enquiring gaze a specific character, of as old a growth, one might think, as the oak itself. Here servants have lived, it may be, since man first learned the trick of setting his foot on his brother's neck. Plainly enough, the monks' servants lived and worked here; half the buildings on the side nearest the house belong to their time, and one of them still bears a partially-defaced coat of arms that must have belonged to an Abbot. And when lay lord succeeded cleric, only the garb and vocabulary of servitude were altered in this square. Its population crossed themselves less, and worked much harder, but they remained in a world of their own, adjacent aud subject to the world of their masters, yet separated from it by oh! such countless and unthinkable distances.

Thorpe sauntered along the side of the stables. He counted three men and a boy who visibly belonged to this department. The dog-cart of the previous evening had been run out upon the brick-pavement which drained the stables, and glistened with expensive smartness now beneath the sponge of one of the hostlers. Under cover, he discerned two other carriages, and there seemed to be at least half a dozen horses. The men who, in the half gloom of the loose-boxes, were busy grooming these animals made a curious whistling noise as they worked. Everybody in the yard touched a forelock to him as he passed.

From this quaint, old-world enclosure he wandered at his leisure, through an open gate in the wall at the back, into the gardens behind the house. There was not much in the way of flowers to look at, but he moved about quite unconscious of any deprivation. A cluster of greenhouses, massed against the southern side of the mansion, attracted his listless fancy, and he walked toward what appeared to be an entrance to them. The door was locked, but he found another further on which opened to his hand. The air was very hot and moist inside, and the place was so filled with broad-leaved, umbrageous tropical plants that he had to stoop to make his way through to the end. The next house had a more tolerable atmosphere, and contained some blossoms to which he gave momentary attention. In the third house, through the glass-door, he could see a man—evidently a gardener—lifting some pots to a shelf overhead.

The thought occurred to him that by entering into conversation with this man, he might indirectly obtain a hint as to the usual breakfast-hour at Hadlow. It was now nearly ten o'clock, and he was getting very hungry. Would they not ring a bell, or sound a gong, or something? he wondered. Perhaps there had been some such summons, and he had not heard it. It might be the intelligent thing for him to return to the house, at all events, and sit in the hall where the servants could see him, in case the meal was in progress.

Looking idly through the glass at the gardener, meanwhile, it suddenly dawned upon him that the face and figure were familiar. He stared more intently at the man, casting about in his memory for a clue to his identity. It came to him that the person he had in mind was a fellow named Gafferson, who had kept an impoverished and down-at-the-heels sort of hotel and general store on the road from Belize to Boon Town, in British Honduras. Yes, it undoubtedly was Gafferson. What on earth was he doing here? Thorpe gave but brief consideration to this problem. It was of more immediate importance to recall the circumstances of his contact with the man. He had made Gafferson's poor shanty of an hotel his headquarters for the better part of a month—the base of supplies from which he made numerous prospecting tours into the mountains of the interior. Had he paid his bill on leaving? Yes, there was no doubt about that. He could even recall a certain pity for the unbusiness-like scale of charges, and the lack of perception of opportunity, which characterized the bill in question. He remembered now his impression that Gafferson would never do any good. It would be interesting to know what kind of an impression he, in turn, had produced on his thriftless host. At any rate, there was no good reason why he should not find out. He opened the door and went in.

The gardener barely looked up from his occupation, and drew aside to let the newcomer pass with no sign of a gesture toward his cap. Thorpe halted, and tried to look at the pots on the staging as if he knew about such things.

"What are you doing?" he asked, in the tentative tone of one who is in no need of information, but desires to be affable.

"Drying off the first lot of gloxinias," answered the other. "Some people put 'em on their sides, but I like 'em upright, close to the glass. It stands to reason, if you think about it."

"Why, certainly," said Thorpe, with conviction. In his mind he contrasted the independence of Gafferson's manner with the practised servility of the stable-yard—and thought that he liked it—and then was not so sure. He perceived that there was no recognition of him. The gardener, as further desultory conversation about his work progressed, looked his interlocutor full in the face, but with a placid, sheep-like gaze which seemed to be entirely insensible to variations in the human species.

"How did you ever get back here to England?" Thorpe was emboldened to ask at last. In comment upon the other's stare of puzzled enquiry, he went on: "You're Gafferson, aren't you? I thought so. When I last saw you, you were running a sort of half-way house, t'other side of Belize. That was in '90."

Gafferson—a thick-set, squat man of middle age, with a straggling reddish beard—turned upon him a tranquil but uninformed eye. "I suppose you would have been stopping at Government House," he remarked. "That was in Sir Roger Goldsworthy's time. They used to come out often to see my flowers. And so you remembered my name. I suppose it was because of the Gaffersoniana hybrids. There was a good bit in the papers about them last spring." Thorpe nodded an assent which it seemed better not to put into words. "Well, it beats all," he mused aloud. "Why, man, there's gold in those mountains! You had an inside track on prospecting, placed as you were. And there's cocoa—and some day they'll coin money in rubber, too. All that country's waiting for is better communications. And you were on the spot, and knew all the lay of the land—and yet here you are back in England, getting so much a month for messing about in the mud."

He saw swiftly that his reflections had carried him beyond his earlier limit, and with rapidity decided upon frankness. "No, I wasn't in the Governor's outfit at all. I was looking for gold then—with occasionally an eye on rubber. I stopped at your place. Don't you remember me? My name's Thorpe. I had a beard then. Why, man, you and one of your niggers were with me three or four days once, up on the ridge beyond the Burnt Hills—why, you remember, the nigger was from San Domingo, and he was forever bragging about the San Domingo peppers, and saying those on the mainland hadn't enough strength to make a baby wrinkle his nose, and you found a pepper coming through the swamp, and you tipped me the wink, and you handed that pepper to the nigger, and it damned near killed him. Hell! You must remember that!"

"That would have been the Chavica pertusum," said Gafferson, thoughtfully. He seemed to rouse himself to an interest in the story itself with some difficulty. "Yes—I remember it," he admitted, finally. "I shouldn't have known you though. I'm the worst in the world about remembering people. It seems to be growing on me. I notice that when I go up to London to the shows, I don't remember the men that I had the longest talks with the time before. Once you get wrapped up in your flowers, you've got no room in your head for anything else—that's the way of it."

Thorpe considered him with a ruminating eye. "So this is the sort of thing you really like, eh? You'd rather be doing this, eh? than making your pile in logwood and mahogany out there, or floating a gold mine?" Gafferson answered quite simply: "I wasn't the kind to ever make a pile. I got led into going out there when I was a youngster, and there didn't seem to be any good in trying to get back, but I wasn't making more than a bare living when you were there, and after that I didn't even do that much. It took me a good many years to find out what my real fancy was. I hated my hotel and my store, but I was crazy about my garden. Finally an American gentleman came along one day, and he put up at my place, and he saw that I was as near ruined as they make 'em, and he says to me, 'You're no good to run a hotel, nor yet a store, and this aint your country for a cent. What you're born for is to grow flowers. You can't afford to do it here, because nobody'll pay you for it, but you gather up your seeds and roots and so on, and come along with me to Atlanta, Georgia, and I'll put fat on your bones.'

"That's what he said to me, and I took him at his word, and I was with him two years, and then I thought I'd like to come to England, and since then I've worked my way up here, till now I take a Royal Horticultural medal regular, and there's a clematis with salmon-coloured bars that'll be in the market next spring that's named after my master. And what could I ask more 'n that?"

"Quite right," said Thorpe. "What time do they have breakfast here?"

The gardener's round, phlegmatic, florid countenance had taken on a mild glow of animation during his narrative. It relapsed into lethargy at the advent of this new topic.

"It seems to me they eat at all hours," he said. "But if you want to see his Lordship," he went on, considering, "about noon would be your best time."

"See his Lordship!" repeated Thorpe, with an impatient grin. "Why I'm a guest here in the house. All I want is something to eat."

"A guest," Gafferson repeated in turn, slowly. There was nothing unpleasant in the intonation, and Thorpe's sharp glance failed to detect any trace of offensive intention in his companion's fatuous visage. Yet it seemed to pass between the two men that Gafferson was surprised, and that there were abundant grounds for his surprise.

"Why, yes," said Thorpe, with as much nonchalance as he could summon, "your master is one of my directors. I've taken a fancy to him, and I'm going to make a rich man of him. He was keen about my seeing his place here, and kept urging me to come, and so finally I've got away over Sunday to oblige him. By the way—I shall buy an estate in the country as soon as the right thing offers, and I shall want to set up no end of gardens and greenhouses and all that. I see that I couldn't come to a better man than you for advice. I daresay I'll put the whole arrangement of it in your hands. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"

"Whatever his Lordship agrees to," the gardener replied, sententiously. He turned to the staging, and took up one of the pots.

Thorpe swung on his heel, and moved briskly toward the further door, which he could see opened upon the lawn. He was conscious of annoyance with this moon-faced, dawdling Gafferson, who had been afforded such a splendid chance of profiting by an old acquaintanceship—it might even be called, as things went in Honduras, a friendship—and who had so clumsily failed to rise to the situation. The bitter thought of going back and giving him a half-crown rose in Thorpe's inventive mind, and he paused for an instant, his hand on the door-knob, to think it over. The gratuity would certainly put Gafferson in his place, but then the spirit in which it was offered would be wholly lost on his dull brain. And moreover, was it so certain that he would take it? He had not said "sir" once, and he had talked about medals with the pride of a scientist. The rules were overwhelmingly against a gardener rejecting a tip, of course, but if there was no more than one chance in twenty of it, Thorpe decided that he could not afford the risk.

He quitted the greenhouse with resolution, and directed his steps toward the front of the mansion. As he entered the hall, a remarkably tuneful and resonant chime filled his ears with novel music. He looked and saw that a white-capped, neatly-clad domestic, standing with her back to him beside the newel-post of the stairs, was beating out the tune with two padded sticks upon some strips of metal ranged on a stand of Indian workmanship. The sound was delightful, but even more so was the implication that it betokened breakfast.

With inspiration, he drew forth the half-crown which he had been fingering in his pocket, and gave it to the girl as she turned. "That's the kind of concert I like," he declared, bestowing the patronage of a jovial smile upon her pleased and comely face. "Show me the way to this breakfast that you've been serenading about."

Out in the greenhouse, meanwhile, Gafferson continued to regard blankly the shrivelled, fatty leaves of the plant he had taken up. "Thorpe," he said aloud, as if addressing the tabid gloxinia—"Thorpe—yes—I remember his initials—J. S. Thorpe. Now, who's the man that told me about him? and what was it he told me?"



CHAPTER VII

THE experiences of the breakfast room were very agreeable indeed. Thorpe found himself the only man present, and, after the first few minutes of embarrassment at this discovery, it filled him with surprised delight to note how perfectly he was at his ease. He could never have imagined himself seated with four ladies at a table—three of them, moreover, ladies of title—and doing it all so well.

For one thing, the ladies themselves had a morning manner, so to speak, which differed widely from the impressions he had had of their deportment the previous evening. They seemed now to be as simple and fresh and natural as the unadorned frocks they wore. They listened with an air of good-fellowship to him when he spoke; they smiled at the right places; they acted as if they liked him, and were glad of his company.

The satisfied conviction that he was talking well, and behaving well, accompanied him in his progress through the meal. His confession at the outset of his great hunger, and of the sinister apprehensions which had assailed him in his loitering walk about the place, proved a most fortuitous beginning; after that, they were ready to regard everything he said as amusing.

"Oh, when we're by ourselves," the kindly little old hostess explained to him, "my daughter and I breakfast always at nine. That was our hour yesterday morning, for example. But when my son is here, then it's farewell to regularity. We put breakfast back till ten, then, as a kind of compromise between our own early habits and his lack of any sort of habits. Why we do it I couldn't say—because he never comes down in any event. He sleeps so well at Hadlow—and you know in town he sleeps very ill indeed—and so we don't dream of complaining. We're only too glad—for his sake."

"And Balder," commented the sister, "he's as bad the other way. He gets up at some unearthly hour, and has his tea and a sandwich from the still-room, and goes off with his rod or his gun or the dogs, and we never see him till luncheon."

"I've been on the point of asking so many times," Miss Madden interposed—"is Balder a family name, or is it after the Viking in Matthew Arnold's poem?"

"It was his father's choice," Lady Plowden made answer. "I think the Viking explanation is the right one—it certainly isn't in either family. I can't say that it attracted me much—at first, you know."

"Oh, but it fits him so splendidly," said Lady Cressage. "He looks the part, as they say. I always thought it was the best of all the soldier names—and you have only to look at him to see that he was predestined for a soldier from his cradle."

"I wish the Sandhurst people would have a good long look at him, then," put in the mother with earnestness underlying the jest of her tone. "The poor boy will never pass those exams in the world. It IS ridiculous, as his father always said. If there ever was a man who was made for a soldier, it's Balder. He's a gentleman, and he's connected by tradition with the Army, and he's mad about everything military—and surely he's as clever as anybody else at everything except that wretched matter of books, and even there it's only a defect of memory—and yet that suffices to prevent his serving his Queen. And all over England there are young gentlemen like that—the very pick of the hunting-fields, strong and brave as lions, fit to lead men anywhere, the very men England wants to have fighting her battles—and they can't get places in the Army because—what was it Balder came to grief over last time?—because they can't remember whether it's Ispahan or Teheran that's the capital of Persia.

"They are the fine old sort that would go and capture both places at the point of the bayonet—and find out their names afterward—but it seems that's not what the Army wants nowadays. What is desired now is superior clerks, and secretaries and professors of languages—and much good they will do us when the time of trouble comes!"

"Then you think the purchase-system was better?" asked the American lady. "It always seemed to me that that must have worked so curiously."

"Prefer it?" said Lady Plowden. "A thousand times yes! My husband made one of the best speeches in the debate on it—one do I say?—first and last he must have made a dozen of them. If anything could have kept the House of Lords firm, in the face of the wretched Radical outcry, it would have been those speeches. He pointed out all the evils that would follow the change. You might have called it prophetic—the way he foresaw what would happen to Balder—or not Balder in particular, of course, but that whole class of young gentlemen.

"As he said, you have only to ask yourself what kind of people the lower classes naturally look up to and obey and follow. Will they be ordered about by a man simply because he knows Greek and Latin and Hebrew? Do they respect the village schoolmaster, for example, on account of his learning? Not in the very slightest! On the contrary, they regard him with the greatest contempt. The man they will serve is the man whose birth gives him the right to command them, or else the man with money in his pockets to make it worth their while. These two are the only leaders they understand. And if that's true here in England, in times of peace, among our own people, how much truer must it be of our soldiers, away from England, in a time of war?"

"But, mamma," the Hon. Winifred intervened, "don't you see how badly that might work nowadays? now that the good families have so little money, and all the fortunes are in the hands of stockjobbing people—and so on? It would be THEIR sons who would buy all the commissions—and I'm sure Balder wouldn't get on at all with that lot."

Lady Plowden answered with decision and great promptness. "You see so little of the world, Winnie dear, that you don't get very clear ideas of its movements. The people who make fortunes in England are every whit as important to its welfare as those who inherit names, and individually I'm sure they are often much more deserving. Every generation sniffs at its nouveaux riches, but by the next they have become merged in the aristocracy. It isn't a new thing in England at all. It has always been that way. Two-thirds of the peerage have their start from a wealthy merchant, or some other person who made a fortune. They are really the back-bone of England. You should keep that always in mind."

"Of course—I see what you mean"—Winnie replied, her dark cheek flushing faintly under the tacit reproof. She had passed her twenty-fifth birthday, but her voice had in it the docile self-repression of a school-girl. She spoke with diffident slowness, her gaze fastened upon her plate. "Of course—my grandfather was a lawyer—and your point is that merchants—and others who make fortunes—would be the same."

"Precisely," said Lady Plowden. "And do tell us, Mr. Thorpe"—she turned toward where he sat at her right and beamed at him over her spectacles, with the air of having been wearied with a conversation in which he bore no part—"is it really true that social discontent is becoming more marked in America, even, than it is with us in England?"

"I'm not an American, you know," he reminded her. "I only know one or two sections of the country—and those only as a stranger. You should ask Miss Madden."

"Me?" said Celia. "Oh, I haven't come up for my examinations yet. I'm like Balder—I'm preparing."

"What I should like Mr. Thorpe to tell us," suggested Lady Cressage, mildly, "is about the flowers in the tropics—in Java, for example, or some of the West Indies. One hears such marvelous tales about them."

"Speaking of flowers," Thorpe suddenly decided to mention the fact; "I met out in one of the greenhouses here this morning, an old acquaintance of mine, the gardener, Gafferson. The last time I saw him, he was running the worst hotel in the world in the worst country in the world—out in British Honduras."

"But he's a wonderful gardener," said Lady Cressage. "He's a magician; he can do what he likes with plants. It's rather a hobby of mine—or used to be—and I never saw his equal."

Thorpe told them about Gafferson, in that forlorn environment on the Belize road, and his success in making them laugh drew him on to other pictures of the droll side of life among the misfits of adventure. The ladies visibly dallied over their tea-cups to listen to him; the charm of having them all to himself, and of holding them in interested entertainment by his discourse—these ladies of supremely refined associations and position—seemed to provide an inspiration of its own. He could hear that his voice was automatically modulating itself to their critical ears. His language was producing itself with as much delicacy of selection as if it came out of a book—and yet preserving the savour of quaint, outlandish idiom which his listeners clearly liked. Upon the instant when Lady Plowden's gathering of skirts, and glance across the table, warned him that they were to rise, he said deliberately to himself that this had been the most enjoyable episode of his whole life.

There were cigar boxes on the fine old oak mantel, out in the hall, and Winnie indicated them to him with the obvious suggestion that he was expected to smoke. He looked her over as he lit his cigar—where she stood spreading her hands above the blaze of the logs, and concluded that she was much nicer upon acquaintance than he had thought. Her slight figure might not be beautiful, but beyond doubt its lines were ladylike. The same extenuating word applied itself in his mind to her thin and swarthy, though distinguished, features. They bore the stamp of caste, and so did the way she looked at one through her eye-glasses, from under those over-heavy black eyebrows, holding her head a little to one side. Though it was easy enough to guess that she had a spirit of her own, her gentle, almost anxious, deference to her mother had shown that she had it under admirable control.

He had read about her in a peerage at his sister's book-shop the previous day. Unfortunately it did not give her age, but that was not so important, after all. She was styled Honourable. She was the daughter of one Viscount and the sister of another. Her grandfather had been an Earl, and the book had shown her to possess a bewildering number of relationships among titled folks. All this was very interesting to him—and somewhat suggestive. Vague, shapeless hints at projects rose in his brain as he looked at her.

"I'm afraid you think my brother has odd notions of entertaining his guests," she remarked to him, over her shoulder. The other ladies had not joined them.

"Oh, I'm all right," he protested cordially. "I should hate to have him put himself out in the slightest." Upon consideration he added: "I suppose he has given up the idea of shooting to-day."

"I think not," she answered." The keeper was about this morning, that is—and he doesn't often come unless they are to go out with the guns. I suppose you are very fond of shooting."

"Well—I've done some—in my time," Thorpe replied, cautiously. It did not seem necessary to explain that he had yet to fire his first gun on English soil. "It's a good many years," he went on, "since I had the time and opportunity to do much at it. I think the last shooting I did was alligators. You hit 'em in the eye, you know. But what kind of a hand I shall make of it with a shot-gun, I haven't the least idea. Is the shooting round I here pretty good?"

"I don't think it's anything remarkable. Plowden says my brother Balder kills all the birds off every season. Balder's by way of being a crack-shot, you know. There are some pheasants, though. We saw them flying when we were out this morning."

Thorpe wondered if it would be possible to consult her upon the question of apparel. Clearly, he ought to make some difference in his garb, yet the mental vision of him-self in those old Mexican clothes revealed itself now as ridiculously impossible. He must have been out of his mind to have conceived anything so preposterous as rigging himself out, among these polished people, like a cow-puncher down on his luck.

"I wonder when your brother will expect to start," he began, uneasily. "Perhaps I ought to go and get ready."

"Ah, here comes his man," remarked the sister. A round-faced, smooth-mannered youngster—whom Thorpe discovered to be wearing cord-breeches and leather leggings as he descended the stairs—advanced toward him and prefaced his message by the invariable salutation. "His Lordship will be down, sir, in ten minutes—and he hopes you'll be ready, sir," the valet said.

"Send Pangbourn to this gentleman's room," Miss Winnie bade him, and with a gesture of comprehensive submission he went away.

The calm readiness with which she had provided a solution for his difficulties impressed Thorpe greatly. It would never have occurred to him that Pangbourn was the answer to the problem of his clothes, yet how obvious it had been to her. These old families did something more than fill their houses with servants; they mastered the art of making these servants an integral part of the machinery of existence. Fancy having a man to do all your thinking about clothes for you, and then dress you, into the bargain. Oh, it was all splendid.

"It seems that we're going shooting," Thorpe found himself explaining, a few moments later in his bedroom, to the attentive Pangbourn. He decided to throw himself with frankness upon the domestic's resourceful good-feeling. "I haven't brought anything for shooting at all. Somehow I got the idea we were going to do rough riding instead—and so I fetched along some old Mexican riding-clothes that make me feel more at home in the saddle than anything else would. You know how fond a man gets of old, loose things like that. But about this shooting—I want you to fix me out. What do I need? Just some breeches and leggings, eh? You can manage them for me, can't you?"

Pangbourn could and did—and it was upon his advice that the Mexican jacket was utilized to complete the out-fit. Its shape was beyond doubt uncommon, but it had big pockets, and it looked like business. Thorpe, as he glanced up and down his image in the tall mirror of the wardrobe, felt that he must kill a large number of birds to justify the effect of pitiless proficiency which this jacket lent to his appearance.

"We will find a cap below, sir," Pangbourn announced, with serenity, and Thorpe, who had been tentatively fingering the big, flaring sombrero, thrust it back upon its peg as if it had proved too hot to handle.

Downstairs in the hall there was more waiting to be done, and there was nobody now to bear him company. He lit another cigar, tried on various caps till he found a leathern one to suit him, and then dawdled about the room and the adjoining conservatory for what seemed to him more than half an hour. This phase of the aristocratic routine, he felt, did not commend itself so warmly to him as did some others. Everybody else, however, seemed to regard it as so wholly a matter of course that Plowden should do as he liked, that he forbore formulating a complaint even to himself.

At last, this nobleman's valet descended the stairs once more. "His Lordship will be down very shortly now, sir," he declared—"and will you be good enough to come into the gun-room, sir, and see the keeper?"

Thorpe followed him through a doorway under the staircase—the existence of which he had not suspected—into a bare-looking apartment fitted like a pantry with shelves. After the semi-gloom of the hall, it was almost glaringly lighted. The windows and another door opened, he saw, upon a court connected with the stable-yard. By this entrance, no doubt, had come the keeper, a small, brown-faced, brown-clothed man of mature years, with the strap of a pouch over his shoulder, who stood looking at the contents of the shelves. He mechanically saluted Thorpe in turn, and then resumed his occupation. There were numerous gun cases on the lower shelf, and many boxes and bags above.

"Did his Lordship say what gun?" the keeper demanded of the valet. He had a bright-eyed, intent glance, and his tone conveyed a sense of some broad, impersonal, out-of-doors disdain for liveried house-men.

The valet, standing behind Thorpe, shrugged his shoulders and eloquently shook his head.

"Do you like an 'ammerless, sir?" the keeper turned to Thorpe.

To his intense humiliation, Thorpe could not make out the meaning of the query. "Oh, anything'll do for me," he said, awkwardly smiling. "It's years since I've shot—I daresay one gun'll be quite the same as another to me."

He felt the knowing bright eyes of the keeper taking all his measurements as a sportsman. "You'd do best with 'B,' sir, I fancy," the functionary decided at last, and his way of saying it gave Thorpe the notion that "B" must be the weapon that was reserved for school-boys. He watched the operation of putting the gun together, and then took it, and laid it over his arm, and followed the valet out into the hall again, in dignified silence. To the keeper's remark—"Mr. Balder has its mate with him today, sir," he gave only a restrained nod.

There were even now whole minutes to wait before Lord Plowden appeared. He came down the stairs then with the brisk, rather impatient air of a busy man whose plans are embarrassed by the unpunctuality of others. He was fully attired, hob-nailed shoes, leggings, leather coat and cap, gloves, scarf round his throat and all—and he behaved as if there was not a minute to lose. He had barely time to shake perfunctorily the hand Thorpe offered him, and utter an absent-minded "How are you this morning?"

To the valet, who hurried forward to open the outer door, bearing his master's gun and a camp-stool, he said reproachfully, "We are very late today, Barnes." They went out, and began striding down the avenue of trees at such a pace that the keeper and his following of small boys and dogs, who joined them near the road, were forced into a trot to keep up with it.

Thorpe had fancied, somehow, that a day's shooting would afford exceptional opportunities for quiet and intimate talk with his host, but he perceived very soon that this was not to be the case. They walked together for half a mile, it is true, along a rural bye-road first and then across some fields, but the party was close at their heels, and Plowden walked so fast that conversation of any sort, save an occasional remark about the birds and the covers between him and the keeper, was impracticable. The Hon. Balder suddenly turned up in the landscape, leaning against a gate set in a hedgerow, and their course was deflected toward him, but even when they came up to him, the expedition seemed to gain nothing of a social character. The few curt words that were exchanged, as they halted here to distribute cartridges and hold brief consultation, bore exclusively upon the subject in hand.

The keeper assumed now an authority which Thorpe, breathing heavily over the unwonted exercise and hoping for nothing so much as that they would henceforth take things easy, thought intolerable. He was amazed that the two brothers should take without cavil the arbitrary orders of this elderly peasant. He bade Lord Plowden proceed to a certain point in one direction, and that nobleman, followed by his valet with the gun and the stool, set meekly off without a word. Balder, with equal docility, vaulted the gate, and moved away down the lane at the bidding of the keeper. Neither of them had intervened to mitigate the destiny of their guest, or displayed any interest as to what was going to become of him.

Thorpe said to himself that he did not like this—and though afterward, when he had also climbed the gate and taken up his station under a clump of trees at the autocrat's behest, he strove to soothe his ruffled feelings by the argument that it was probably the absolutely correct deportment for a shooting party, his mind remained unconvinced. Moreover, in parting from him, the keeper had dropped a blunt injunction about firing up or down the lane, the tone even more than the matter of which nettled him.

To cap all, when he presently ventured to stroll about a little from the spot on which he had been planted, he caught a glimpse against the skyline of the distant Lord Plowden, comfortably seated on the stool which his valet had been carrying. It seemed to Thorpe at that moment that he had never wanted to sit down so much before in his life—and he turned on his heel in the wet grass with a grunt of displeasure.

This mood vanished utterly a few moments later. The remote sounds had begun to come to him, of boys shouting and dogs barking, in the recesses of the strip of woodland which the lane skirted, and at these he hastened back to his post. It did not seem to him a good place, and when he heard the reports of guns to right and left of him, and nothing came his way, he liked it less than ever; it had become a matter of offended pride with him, however, to relieve the keeper of no atom of the responsibility he had taken upon himself. If Lord Plowden's guest had no sport, the blame for it should rest upon Lord Plowden's over-arrogant keeper. Then a noise of a different character assailed his ears, punctuated as it were by distant boyish cries of "mark!" These cries, and the buzzing sound as of clockwork gone wrong which they accompanied and heralded, became all at once a most urgent affair of his own. He strained his eyes upon the horizon of the thicket—and, as if by instinct, the gun sprang up to adjust its sight to this eager gaze, and followed automatically the thundering course of the big bird, and then, taking thought to itself, leaped ahead of it and fired. Thorpe's first pheasant reeled in the air, described a somersault, and fell like a plummet.

He stirred not a step, but reloaded the barrel with a hand shaking for joy. From where he stood he could see the dead bird; there could never have been a cleaner "kill." In the warming glow of his satisfaction in himself, there kindled a new liking of a different sort for Plowden and Balder. He owed to them, at this belated hour of his life, a novel delight of indescribable charm. There came to him, from the woods, the shrill bucolic voice of the keeper, admonishing a wayward dog. He was conscious of even a certain tenderness for this keeper—and again the cry of "mark!" rose, strenuously addressed to him.

Half an hour later the wood had been cleared, and Thorpe saw the rest of the party assembling by the gate. He did not hurry to join them, but when Lord Plowden appeared he sauntered slowly over, gun over arm, with as indifferent an air as he could simulate. It pleased him tremendously that no one had thought it worth while to approach the rendezvous by way of the spot he had covered. His eye took instant stock of the game carried by two of the boys; their combined prizes were eight birds and a rabbit, and his heart leaped within him at the count.

"Well, Thorpe?" asked Plowden, pleasantly. The smell of gunpowder and the sight of stained feathers had co-operated to brighten and cheer his mood. "I heard you blazing away in great form. Did you get anything?"

Thorpe strove hard to give his voice a careless note. "Let some of the boys run over," he said slowly. "There are nine birds within sight, and there are two or three in the bushes—but they may have got away."

"Gad!" said Balder.

"Magnificent!" was his brother's comment—and Thorpe permitted himself the luxury of a long-drawn, beaming sigh of triumph.

The roseate colouring of this triumph seemed really to tint everything that remained of Thorpe's visit. He set down to it without hesitation the visible augmentation of deference to him among the servants. The temptation was very great to believe that it had affected the ladies of the house as well. He could not say that they were more gracious to him, but certainly they appeared to take him more for granted. In a hundred little ways, he seemed to perceive that he was no longer held mentally at arm's length as a stranger to their caste. Of course, his own restored self-confidence could account for much of this, but he clung to the whimsical conceit that much was also due to the fact that he was the man of the pheasants.