Front matter (continued 3)

"We go," continued the Emperor, "with breaking hearts."

"We do! we do!" from the Empress.

More murmurs.

"But we feel that—that—we feel, I may say, that those we leave behind us in the home will not desert their master and missus; that they will do their duty by us, as we have done ours by them."

"True, true! Oh, indeed!" deep-mouthed from Mr. Harrison.

"Thank you, Mr. Harrison. We, me and Mrs. Lite, shall not forget that."

An inclination from the groom of the chambers.

"Others," proceeded the Emperor, in a loud and aspen-like voice, "others will come after us. Others will take our places. So it must ever be—bear up, Henrietta, my love, bear up!—so, I say, it must be. Things is—are like that in this world. Never a one can deny it. Do your duty by them!"

"No, no, Perry! Oh no, no!" from the now sodden Empress.

"Hush, my dear! Do your duty one and all in those places into which they have been pleased to call you." Here the Emperor gingerly approached the wording of the catechism. "Do it, I say, but don't be put upon."

Loud murmurs of assent, more especially from those engaged in the kitchen department of the establishment.

"Don't be put upon. Don't be slaves."

"Hear, hear!" from Mr. Harrison.

"And"—here the Emperor obviously faltered—"don't go for to forget the—old faces. Mr. Harrison——" His voice suddenly burst out in a trumpet-note of forcible resolution.

"Sir!"

"Is the pony-shay at the door?"

"It is, sir! Oh, most decidedly!"

The massive portals were flung open, and outside in the gay summer sunlight there appeared a basket-chaise drawn by a fat white pony, and led by a little groom. The four pugs stood round it barking vociferously. The Emperor threw one last distracted glance around, then shut his eyes, took hold of the Empress, and, pioneered by Mr. Harrison, moved slowly forward. The Empress, as one in a ghastly dream, accompanied him. In a moment she would have been placed in the chaise and driven from the dreadful scene, calm, blank, practically unconscious of her doom. But this was not to be. Fate willed it otherwise. Seized by a sudden, and it must be confessed a very noble, impulse, the powdered Frederick had run like a lamplighter to the purple drawing-room. The orchestrion stood before him. He leaped upon it as the wild beast leaps upon its prey. He caught at it. An instant! Then there was the sound of a click, and suddenly the wild and thrilling uproar of Tosti's "Good-bye!" poured violently through the reverberating palace.

The Empress heard it. She paused. She trembled. She opened her mouth. Something with her brain seemed to go snap. She shrieked aloud. The Emperor saw what was coming.

"Mr. Harrison!" he shouted.

"Sir!"

"Help me with Mrs. Lite! Get hold of her, Mr. Harrison, get hold of her!"

Mr. Harrison got hold of her, and, yelling, kicking, laughing, crying, and throwing her rounded limbs furiously abroad, the Empress was carried down the steps, placed in the "shay," and rapidly driven off. Then Mr. Harrison returned into the hall.

"Prepare for the Londoners!" he said sternly to the household, and hurried instantly off to bed.

Soon after the big clock over the Ribton Marches stables had boomed out the half-hour after twelve, a carriage drove rapidly up to the palace, followed by a second, and succeeded by a private omnibus covered with luggage. The tribe were arriving. In the first carriage sat Mrs. Verulam, pale, but full of an animation that approached excitement; Chloe, clad in a delicious suit of tweed, with perfectly-falling trousers, the newest thing in collars, a red tie, and a straw hat; and Mr. Rodney playing cicerone and looking mightily serious. Why will presently be revealed. In the second carriage was placed the faithful Marriner, amid a cloud of wraps, dressing-cases, hat-boxes, parasols, and jewel-caskets. In the omnibus sat Mr. Rodney's valet, a pale gentleman with an under-sized manner, the features of a rat, and very thin legs. Thus the vanguard approached. Chloe was apparently in fine spirits. She was talking incessantly, showing white teeth, and gazing about her with black eyes that sparkled with animation.

"Oh, is this really Ascot?" she cried. "Where is the course?"

"My dear Van Adam!" gently corrected Mr. Rodney; "the course is at some distance. This is Sunninghill."

"What a number of cupolas!" said Mrs. Verulam. "And what an enormous house! We shall be lost in it!"

"I assure you it is quite cosy inside," said Mr. Rodney, who considered the last remark as a sort of reflection upon him for engaging the house for the week. "The Lites consider it most home-like, I assure you; and they are very particular. Here is the entrance."

The gravel flew up beneath the hoofs of the high-stepping horses. The front door of the home opened wide, and discovered two footmen, behind and between whom were visible the large body and red face of Mr. Harrison, his features being decorated with an expression which it would be tame indeed to call one of suspicion. Imagine a London policeman who observes a ragged ruffian stealing out of the Tower of London with his hands full of the Crown jewels, and you may form some slight notion of the groom of the chambers' demeanour and facial attitudes on the entry of the Londoners into the hall of Ribton Marches. He had evidently been sleeping to some purpose, for he was now preternaturally wide awake, and not a person descended from the carriages, not a thing was removed therefrom, without having to run the gauntlet of his piercing and most extraordinary observation.

"What a very remarkable-looking man," Mrs. Verulam remarked to Mr. Rodney, as she removed her dust-wrap and walked towards the purple drawing-room. "He seems anxious. Is he ill?"

"Oh no; I think not. I fancy he superintends the servants," said Mr. Rodney.

"Or us," said Chloe, flicking the dust off her patent-leather boots in a way that was hardly Englishmanly. "He appears to me like a detective who hasn't mastered the first principle of his profession."

"And may I ask what this is?" blandly enquired Mr. Rodney.

"Certainly, old chap—not to look like one. See?"

Mr. Rodney did see, and secretly writhed. When he was called "old chap" he felt much as the maiden lady did when Mr. Pickwick appeared from the four-post bed, and recently Huskinson's familiarities had tried him deeply.

"What a very purple room!" said Mrs. Verulam, glancing round. "What is that thing over there—not a sideboard, nor a bureau, nor a writing-table?"

"That, madam," bayed a sudden voice, "is the instrument. Mr. and Mrs. Lite are very partial to it, but do not allow it to be employed during their absence."

Mr. Harrison was the speaker. Mr. Rodney was outraged by his intrusion into the conversation.

"Thank you," he said. "Kindly leave us."

Mr. Harrison hesitated visibly, but Mr. Rodney meant to be obeyed, so the groom of the chambers very deliberately decamped, casting his feet abroad after his manner.

"What a most extraordinary person!" said Mrs. Verulam.

"Oh, I daresay Mr. Lite has made a friend of him," said Mr. Rodney hastily. "These nouveaux riches do strange things."

"Hallelujah, bow-wow-wow!" murmured a distant voice; to which another voice responded: "Polly dreadful drunk. What's o'clock, Polly?" Then innumerable corks were drawn with apparently supernatural swiftness.

Mr. Rodney reddened.

"Pray don't be alarmed," he said to Mrs. Verulam, who was visibly startled.

"Is it the same man?" she said. "Why, he must be mad."

"No, no. They are only Mrs. Lite's parrots talking in one of the winter gardens. It must be nearly lunch time. Would you not like to see your rooms?"

"Perhaps it would be as well. I feel as if you were my kind host."

Mr. Rodney beamed with pride and pleasure.

"I hope some day—at Mitching Dean—from which, by the way, I have ventured to order up a supply of grapes for the week. The Mitching Dean grapes are remarkably fine. Here is Mrs. Marriner," as the faithful Marriner appeared, apparently hypnotised by the orchestrion; "she will conduct you. By the way," Mr. Rodney added, turning to Huskinson, "I trust you will allow my man Harry to valet you during the week, since you've not yet succeeded in finding a man to your liking. Harry is——"

"No, no, thank you. You're awfully good; but it's not necessary," replied Chloe with some haste.

"Most efficient," calmly pursued Mr. Rodney, intent on benevolence to the man he heartily hated. "He shaves better than any——"

"Thank you, I always shave myself," said Chloe—"morning and evening."

"So often?" said Mr. Rodney, with a glance of surprise at the smooth face above the tweed coat.

"Once a month—once a week, I mean. Well, I'll go and have a wash;" and she scurried off, leaving Mr. Rodney alone in the purple drawing-room.

He sat down on a purple chair, placed his thin feet on a purple stool, and fell into deep meditation. Since we first met him, in early May, perplexity had almost continually attended him. Mr. Rodney's mainspring was propriety, touched up with the adjective "smart." He believed devoutly in conventionality and titles. Respectability and pedigrees were necessaries to him, and as yet he had never been without them. It is true that he could accept the "right sort of man—or woman," even if he were aware that their lives were not ordered entirely on Nonconformist principles. In fact, he knew a great many rascals of both sexes, but they were rascals who knew everybody and were known by everybody. The women were all received at Court; the men all belonged to the right clubs, and so, according to Mr. Rodney's code, they were eminently respectable. Mr. Rodney had no special objection to people who broke the Ten Commandments, but he had a very great and very deeply-seated horror of people who outraged society. And this was what Mrs. Verulam—whom he admired, after Mitching Dean, more than anything on earth—seemed bent upon doing.

As he sat in the purple drawing-room with his eyes fixed moodily on the orchestrion, he reviewed the events of the last few weeks without gaining any comfort from them. Undoubtedly Mrs. Verulam had succeeded in making herself the talk of the town with the Van Adam. She had never moved without the divorced orange-grower in her pocket. She had taken him to every party; she had continually been alone with him in her opera-box; she had supped with him at the Savoy and at Willis's; she had driven down with him to Ranelagh, and returned after the moon was up; she had been with him on the river, and even in it, for Chloe had caught a crab near Athens, and been rescued by the steam-launch of a Cabinet Minister. All London was talking of her strange indiscretions. All London was talking—would all London presently be acting? That was the horrid thought, the grisly idea, which turned Mr. Rodney cold on the purple brocade and set the orchestrion dancing in front of his eyes. Even his jealousy faded before the spectre of Mrs. Verulam abandoned by society; "out of it," a person reduced to "first nights" and supper parties in shady restaurants. To be obliged to depend on "first nights" for one's gaiety was, to Mr. Rodney, much the same thing as having to keep house in the valley of dry bones. It was immolation. It was more: it was interment. He heard the earth pattering upon Mrs. Verulam's coffin. And the terrible thing was that some evil spirit seemed to have entered into Mrs. Verulam, a spirit that rejoiced in this threatening of disaster. She was with her own hands cutting through the cables that moored her to all that makes life worth living. And for an American! A man mixed up with oranges, the commonest of all fruits, the yellow thing that may be seen on the breakfast-tables of the lower middle classes, the abomination that is sucked in pits, whose pips are flung in showers from a thousand galleries a night! Mr. Rodney turned almost faint at the thought. If this Van Adam had even cultivated nectarines, or made his money in medlars. But no. It might have been nuts, certainly. But even this reflection brought little solace. Mr. Rodney had long since written to his old and valued friend, Lord Bernard Roche, asking a thousand discreet questions about "poor dear old Huskinson." But he had received no reply, no satisfaction to his very natural curiosity about the man so suddenly plunged into the very heart of his heart's life. And though this grave matter so afflicted Mr. Rodney, there was something further to perplex him.

There was James Bush. He was still in a measure shrouded in mystery. Yet Mr. Rodney had sometimes felt his influence upon Mrs. Verulam as one feels a thing in the dark. Since that afternoon when Mr. Rodney practically had a fit on hearing of her intention to abandon society, Mrs. Verulam had not again openly alluded to it, or referred pointedly to Mr. Bush. She thought that to do so might be dangerous, so long as high collars were in fashion for men. Had Mr. Rodney worn a scarf, like a costermonger, she would have been troubled by no such delicacy. But perhaps she had hardly considered that, if Mr. Rodney were seized with convulsions on appreciating the possibility of her abandoning society, he would most probably be attacked by an enemy still more dreadful if he beheld society abandoning her, as now seemed possible. Women are so careless. Mr. Rodney, thinking of Mr. James Bush, drew forth his watch. In something less than a couple of hours that mysterious figure from the Marshes of Bungay, that figure first seen shrouded in the romantic privacy of a reversed meat-safe, was due at the palace. What then? What then? Mr. Rodney, forgetful of lunch, forgetful of his duties as cicerone of Ribton Marches, forgetful of the passing hour that may never return, forgetful even of the orchestrion, and of a life-size and life-like portrait of the Bun Empress in an orange-coloured tea-gown which stared upon him from the opposite wall of the purple drawing-room, plunged into the most solemn meditation, with his chin sunk down upon an opal breast-pin presented to him by an Austrian Archduchess. At length, coming once more to the surface, he recalled the fact that he had not arranged his hair since travelling, and that lunch was imminent. He therefore rose with a sigh to seek the "green bedroom," in which apartment he was to be accommodated during his stay in the palace. But owing to his ignorance of the building, or his absence of mind, or both, he strayed from the right path, and endeavoured to make his way into the upper regions through a side door, and up a staircase which, not having been brought from abroad at an immense cost, was dedicated to the uses of the Bun Emperor's menials. As Mr. Rodney vaguely ascended this staircase, and when he was not quite half-way up, his attention was attracted by the tiny but sharp tinkling of a bell in some hidden place below. He stopped, as one stops when arrested by some triviality in a dream. The tinkling was renewed, and then the following monologue broke upon Mr. Rodney's listening ear:

"Yes, sir—yes, sir. Mr. Harrison, sir—Mr. Harrison. Because I didn't hear the bell, sir. I didn't hear the bell, sir. I didn't hear the—— Because I was in the hall, sir—watching, sir, according to your directions. Yes, sir, they have arrived—the ones on the paper, sir—Mrs. Veddleham, Mr. Rodney, and Mr. Van Adams, sir. What do you say, sir?—one maid and one valet, sir—one maid and one—— Not much to look at, sir. Which, sir—the valet or the maid? Oh, rather like a rat, sir. Rather like a ra—— No, not the maid, sir, the valet. Yes, sir, I know I am—I know I'm responsible, I say, sir. Poke their noses? oh, on no account, sir—by no means—not at all—by no means, sir—not at—— Now, sir? Mr. Rodney is in the purple drawing-room, sir——"

"Am I?" murmured that gentleman vaguely to himself on the stairs.

"The purp—— Mrs. Veddleham, sir? She has retired, sir, to—— Not fatigued, sir, retired.—Seems very quiet, sir, so far. Not Mr. Adams, Mrs. Veddleham, sir. He has gone upstairs, sir—to his bedroom, sir—to brush his hair, I presume, sir—I presume to bru—— I didn't take partic'lar notice, sir—I didn't take partic—— I will, sir; oh, indeed you may depend—— Rely on me, sir—till I drop, sir—I say till I dr—— I beg pardon, sir—the what, sir?—the what do you say, sir?—Partridges, sir?—Parliament do you say, sir?—I beg pardon—peppermint, sir?—pepperm—oh, parrots! Oh dear no, sir—oh dear no, they shall not be tamp—— I say, sir, they shall not be, while I am here, sir.—Thank you, sir, and the same to Mrs. Lite, sir.—Mr. Rodney, sir? Makes himself quite at home, sir—makes himself qui—— I says they do not allow it to be employed in their absence, sir—they do not al—— I thought you would, sir—I am glad I have done ri—— Which, sir?—the which do you say, sir?—the parrots, sir? Do you say the parr—— Oh, quite theirselves, so far, sir—I say they seem quite theirselves so far. A little quiet p'raps, sir—a little quieter than usual p'raps, sir.—Only twice, sir, as I heard—only Hallelujah twice, sir, and rather low if anything, sir—lower than usual if anything, sir. I will notify you, sir—certainly, I will take care to noti—— What, sir? Lame, sir, do you say? Which of 'em, sir? None of 'em are lame, sir—I say none of 'em are lame so far as I've—— Not lame, sir! Not lame! James, sir—oh, I under—— Mr. James Bush, sir!"

Mr. Rodney pricked up his ears at this point, and leaned a little lower upon the balustrade towards the hidden voice of the groom of the chambers.

"Mr. Bush, sir—oh, I will indeed—a special eye on him—certainly, sir. If he should I will indeed, sir—I say I will indeed if he should.—I believe at three-fifteen, sir. If you will give me a mo—a moment I will see, sir——"

Here there was a pause, and a sound of paper rustling.

"It is three-fifteen, sir. In the hall, sir, I will indeed. Rely on—— He shall not, sir—I say he shall not, if I have to—— Night, sir—do you say at night, sir? Very well, sir—I say ver—— I will endeavour not to let him know it, sir. Softly, sir? Oh, most deci—— Mr. Bush, sir? Do you say Mr. Bu—— Rather him, sir, than the rest I see—I say I see, sir. At all times after Mr. Bush, sir—yes."

Just at this point Harry, Mr. Rodney's man, appeared abruptly on the staircase, coming down, and almost ran into his bent-double master. Mr. Rodney hastily reared himself up to his full height.

"Kindly show me my room, Harry," he said; "I am looking for it."

"Certainly, sir," said Harry, wondering very much why his master was looking for it over the balusters of the servants' staircase. He turned back to usher his master to the green bedroom, and Mr. Rodney followed him in the deepest perplexity. What was this about James Bush? What was the man's record? Of what nature was his history? Did the exiled Bun Emperor know more of him than met the eye? Did——

"This is your room, sir," said Harry, throwing open a green door.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Verulam and Chloe had secured a moment to themselves in one of the winter gardens.

"I say," said the latter, "Mr. Rodney's getting very officious, almost as bad as that horrid little Mr. Ingerstall. He wants Harry to shave me!"

"What?" cried Mrs. Verulam, dropping a lump of sugar, by means of which she was tampering with one of the Bun Empress's favourites, much to the gratification of that individual.

"He does!"

"Harry!"

"His man."

"Don't let him, Chloe. Don't be shaved. Let me imp——"

"My dear, is it likely? I told him I always did it myself. But still, these offers are afflicting."

"I wonder Mr. Rodney hadn't more tact," began Mrs. Verulam. Then she recollected herself and laughed. "When shall I remember that you're a man?" she said.

"Perhaps when you get no more invitation cards," said Chloe with solemnity.

"Oh yes, yes!" cried Mrs. Verulam ecstatically. "It has nearly come to that; the goal is in sight at last."

"I believe it is," said Chloe rather grimly. "You don't mean to tell me, Daisy, that you really are in earnest, that you really do want to be put out of this heavenly life?"

"Indeed, indeed I do! This week, perhaps, the cage door will open. Oh!" she clasped her hands in rapture. "This week!"

"Well, you are the most extraordinary creature! But I believe this week will decide it. Daisy, the Duchess means mischief."

"I know."

"I almost thought at the last moment she wouldn't come, that she would think you were too compromised and compromising."

"You don't know her. She hadn't got another invitation for Ascot; she is obliged to use me as a sort of hotel. Besides, you are here, and she's a woman of courage and resource. In spite of all, she still has hopes of you for Lady Pearl."

"It's rather a shame—that part, I mean; but it couldn't be helped. Well, at any rate, I've played the time-honoured rôle of Carlsbad. I've cured her daughter of the gout. That should be counted unto me for righteousness."

"It will, dear. It must. Oh, Chloe, I'm so excited!"

"Why?"

"How forgetful you are! In two hours he will be here. How wonderful it seems!"

"He? Oh, of course, Mr. Bush. Now, Daisy, if you really do wish to get out of society, don't spoil everything by flirting with James Bush instead of with me."

"Flirting!" cried Mrs. Verulam indignantly. "James Bush never flirts; he doesn't know the meaning of the word."

"Then he ought to get one of those explanatory dictionaries—they're only half a dollar apiece."

"Don't, Chloe. Don't be flippant about Mr. Bush. It—it isn't suitable. When you see him you'll understand that in a moment. James Bush has a lofty nature, a little reserved, perhaps. He is apt to be reticent with strangers."

"Does that mean that he never opens his mouth to anyone who isn't a blood relation?"

"I should not go so far as to say that. Still, he is reticent."

"Then don't put him next to me at dinner. Oh, I forgot, of course I shall sit between two women. What's Miss Bindler like?"

"Oh, one of those women who is so much more respectable than she looks that men always find her disappointing."

"I know, now that I've been in London a month."

"She lives by what she makes racing."

"How much is that?"

"A few hundreds a year, I fancy. She is quite a good soul really."

"And Lady Drake? She's the only other one whom I haven't seen, except, of course, the paragon."

Mrs. Verulam blushed softly.

"Lady Drake? Well, she's a widow, you know."

"That tells me all, naturally."

"Nonsense. Her being a widow is really only a sort of accident in her life. Her husband was a V.C."

"What's that?"

"A brave man."

"What odd epithets you have over here. Well?"

"He's been dead thousands of years. She's intensely old."

"Why did you ask her, then?"

"Only because she worries the Duke."

"As Mr. Ingerstall worries the Duchess?"

"Oh no, quite differently."

"Well, but why is the Duke to be worried, too? I don't know him yet; I've only caught sight of him at Hurlingham. Why must he be worried?"

"If he isn't, he is apt to get obstreperous—in quite, quite a different way from the Duchess. I can't explain, really. You'll soon find out. Oh, I forgot, though, you're a man at present, so you won't."

Chloe smiled a rather charming smile of comprehension. But Mrs. Verulam was looking at her with a sort of dawning expression that seemed to mingle alarm with amusement.

"Unless," she added slowly, "unless he should chance to confide in you—in the smoking-room after we've all gone to bed."

"Gracious heavens! I shall go to bed, too."

"Yes, perhaps that would be better."

"I'm quite certain it would. I don't want to feel like Daniel in the lions' den. There's the gong! Oh, I'm so hungry! That's one advantage of being a man—one can eat more if one wishes to."

"Come along, then. But where's—oh, here you are, Mr. Rodney."

Mr. Rodney at this moment entered, looking far more solemn than any owl, and, indeed, with knitted brows and a face almost entirely covered with an artistic disposition of wrinkles.

"Yes, I am here," he said abstractedly. "Yes, here I am."

And they walked into the cedar-wood parlour to lunch.

CHAPTER IX.

MRS. VERULAM'S IDEA OF AGAG.

That curious cerebral condition which we call excitement affects men and women in very different ways. At 3.15 on this Monday afternoon it caused a nervous restlessness in Mrs. Verulam, a hectic calm in Mr. Rodney, and an apoplectic irritability in Mr. Harrison. The first of these victims of the nervous system talked incessantly; the second said nothing at all; the third abused the powdered Frederick, had a "few words"—fifty thousand or thereabouts—with the cook of Ribton Marches, and fell foul of the second housemaid, with whom, in moments of condescension, he was rather apt than otherwise to keep company. And all these circumstances were brought about by Mr. James Bush, at that very moment driving from the Sunningdale station to the palace, with his very large feet up on the cushions of the carriage, and his very small bag of necessaries up on the box. However, he was kept awake by no warning instinct which told him of the turmoil cast before him by his personality, but, on the contrary, slept profoundly, and even snored, with his great head well back on the hood of the barouche. He was awakened by the stoppage of the carriage before the palace door. Inside, in the baronial hall, the crunching of the gravel was heard, and Mrs. Verulam had just said with elaborate indifference:

"Dear me! Can this be Mr. Bush already?"

Mr. Rodney had looked at his watch, and answered:

"I fancy so."

And Chloe had exclaimed:

"By Jove! Bungay Marshes to the front!" a remark which she considered manly, and calculated to impress Mr. Rodney, which it did—with horror.

The palace menials advanced at the double, accompanied by Mr. Harrison, who proceeded with an air of extraordinary precaution, and the drawn expression of one who believes himself to be on the point of catching a murderer red-handed. The mighty portals flew slowly open, and the carriage was revealed, with Mr. Bush laid out in it, his mouth wide open in a yawn, and his fists in his eyes rubbing the slumber out of them, while his snort of astonishment at the sudden interruption of his delicious reveries was distinctly audible in the still summer air.

"What's all this? What the devil is it all?" he said in a huge and rumbling voice to the menials who came forward to assist him from the barouche.

"Ribton Marches, sir," said the powdered Frederick, while Mr. Harrison looked as if doubtful whether it were not his duty to run Mr. Bush in upon the spot without further ado.

"Marchuss?" retorted Mr. Bush—"Marchuss?"

"Yes, sir. Won't you get out, sir?"

Mr. Bush rolled out, rather as a barrel rolls out of a dray down an inclined plane into a vault. Planting his feet upon the marble steps, he turned round and said:

"Lay hold of that bag!"

Frederick laid hold of it with the arms of a man anticipating a considerable weight. As the bag, however, appeared to contain nothing of much greater bulk than a collar-stud, the footman was nearly thrown down by the unexpected triviality of his labour. He almost dropped the bag.

"You'd better!" said Mr. Bush—"you'd better!"

The alarmed menial met the Bungay Marshes eye, and apparently thought he had better not, for he ascended the steps with some rapidity, and vanished into the interior of the palace in the twinkling of an eye.

Mr. Bush lethargically moved onward into the baronial hall, in which Mrs. Verulam, Mr. Rodney, and Chloe were seated.

"Oh, Mr. Bush," cried the former, rising with a lovely blush, and coming forward to meet him, "I am so glad to see you!"

That gentleman grunted, and permitted her to take his hand.

"It is so good of you to come and leave your lovely garden, and all your sheep, and—and bees. Let me introduce you to Mr. Rodney and Mr. Van Adam. The rest of the party come this afternoon."

Mr. Bush threw a couple of nods at Mr. Rodney and Chloe. Then he abruptly exclaimed:

"What are you after, eh?"

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Bush," said Mrs. Verulam in some surprise.

"What are you after?" pursued her gracious guest, with a very sinister intonation.

"Oh, nothing, sir, not at all, by no means!" replied a rather hurried voice, and Mr. Harrison somewhat hastily retreated from a shadowy nook in which he had been taking observations, until that moment erroneously supposed by him to be secret.

"Really, Mr. Rodney," said Mrs. Verulam rather petulantly, "that man is becoming very unnecessary. Can't you keep him in order?"

"I will endeavour—I will certainly endeavour to do so," returned Mr. Rodney in some disorder, turning to pursue Mr. Harrison. Mrs. Verulam had a way of behaving as if he were responsible for everything and everybody in the palace which he began to find distinctly trying.

"Yes, please do," said Mrs. Verulam. "Would you like to go to your room at once, Mr. Bush, or will you rest a little first?"

"I'll rest there. I'll have a lay down," he replied, yawning—"a good lay down."

And, without further parley, he set out for the upper regions of the palace, his boots squeaking as he walked. When the squeaking had died away, Mrs. Verulam turned rapturously to Chloe.

"Well, dear?" she said—"well?"

"Well," responded Chloe, with a good deal of hesitation.

"Isn't he simple? Isn't he straightforward and natural?"

"Oh, quite—quite."

"Yes. And isn't it a relief to find a man like that after all the shams and hypocrisies of society? One is never in doubt about what Mr. Bush is thinking, or what he means. One knows it."

"I should think so."

"Yes; I knew you would agree with me. Oh, how delightful it is to have one friend who feels in all things as one does oneself!"

"Daisy, don't! You forget—you mustn't kiss me."

"Oh, heavens! Could anybody have seen?"

She glanced apprehensively round.

"No; it is all right. But I knew you would. A large, frank nature like that seems to go straight to all that is good and right in one. Oh, do let us take advantage of our opportunity this week! Do—do let us make the most of it."

"Do you mean that Mr. Bush is our opportunity?"

"Yes—yes."

"Well, dear, I don't mind, I'm sure. But the most of Mr. Bush is a great deal. I think he is the largest human being I have ever seen. Now I'm going to wander about the garden and see what the Bun Emperor's plants are like."

And Chloe went off wondering greatly at her friend's enthusiasm for the gentleman from Bungay. She herself could at present see nothing in him but a mountain of humanity, with that face, head, beard, and expression already described as appearing to Mrs. Verulam in the imaginary mirror of the cotillon of her fancy. Nor could his manner—essentially truthful as no doubt it was—be called precisely pleasing. Chloe picked a rose or two and lost herself in wonder. Meanwhile, Mrs. Verulam wandered ecstatically about the palace. Mr. Harrison was busy with the Bun Emperor at the telephone. Mr. Rodney was plunged once more in terrible meditation in the purple drawing-room, and Mr. Bush was enjoying to the utmost his good lay down on one of the Empress's largest spring-mattresses. He woke soon after the arrival of the rest of the party, and strolled heavily forth alone into the grounds to take the air, which had not circulated very freely beneath the quilt with which his head had been completely covered during the last hour and a half.

Meanwhile the baronial hall looked fuller of people than it had ever looked before. Tea was going on, but Mrs. Verulam had declined to allow Mr. Bush to be disturbed.

"He will come in his own good time," she said, "I don't wish to bother him. He is accustomed to perfect liberty."

She addressed the company generally. The Duke of Southborough, who resembled an unusually tall pantaloon in appearance, but was not entirely unlike a clown in manner, said in reply:

"Ah, then, I suppose he's a bachelor."

"Oh, of course," said Mrs. Verulam, with a secret glance at Chloe.

"Poor chap! poor chap!" said the Duke, with his funny demeanour of an actor being remarkably successful in his part. "What a sad business this anti-matrimonial bias that is growing up in the present generation of Englishmen is! Eh, Lady Drake?"

Lady Drake, who was the human equivalent of the most perfect sort of acid-drop that the power of the sugar-plum manufacturer has yet produced, shook her head, on which the hair reposed in bandeaux.

"Men are more selfish than the lower animals, I fear," she said, sweetening her tea with some modern preparation which she always carried about with her in a good-sized phial.

"Oh, Mr. Bush is a most self-sacrificing man, I assure you," said Mrs. Verulam quickly.

"Then why is he a bachelor? That's what Lady Drake means," said the Duke, with a Drury Lane pantomime wink at the company.

"I think the French way of doing things by far the best," cried Mr. Ingerstall, lifting a muffin to his mouth as a juggler poises a billiard-ball on the rounded tip of a cue. "The Frenchman marries as a matter of course, and with no more intention of curtailing his full liberty of action than——"

"The French point of view in that matter is scarcely a suitable subject for discussion, Mr. Ingerstall," said the Duchess of Southborough very severely, while the Duke chuckled to himself. "Full liberty of action! Very good! very good indeed! Ha, ha, ha!" Mr. Ingerstall violently engaged her Grace—began to worry the Duchess, as Chloe said to herself—while Miss Bindler, a wiry lady of about five-and-thirty, who had a face like a horse, a tailor-made manner and boots with spats, turned to Mr. Rodney and asked him what he was going to back on the following day.

"I expect to make a bit on Cubicle in the first race," she said.

"Indeed!" said Mr. Rodney. "I trust I may do the same."

"Did you get a good price?"

"What for?" said Mr. Rodney. "Did I say that I had sold anything?"

This remark shows that the pressure of circumstances was becoming rather too much for the owner of Mitching Dean. In fact, he was considerably agitated. Since her arrival the Duchess had taken him aside and indulged him with some very dreadful confidences. Her Grace had been pleased to tell him, "as an old friend," that she had been on the very point of telegraphing at the last moment to Mrs. Verulam to give up her visit.

"She has been going too far, Mr. Rodney," said the Duchess in a whispering bass. "She has disgusted London."

"Disgusted London!" cried the appalled confidant. "Oh, no; impossible!"

"You think nothing could; but you are wrong. There is a limit even in our world, and she has overstepped it. You will see that to-morrow in the enclosure. Old Martha Sage intends to cut her."

"Impossible!" reiterated Mr. Rodney, the perspiration starting in beads upon his narrow forehead.

"Nothing is impossible to Martha Sage. I assure you it is the fact."

"It must be prevented," cried Mr. Rodney. "It must, it shall!"

He felt as Curtius probably did when he found that he really was in the gulf.

"I don't see how it can be," said the Duchess. "You don't know Martha Sage."

"But indeed I do," said Mr. Rodney. "She has often dandled me in her arms."

"What, recently?"

"Yes, yes," he rejoined distractedly; "often and often."

"Possibly you may have some influence over her then," said the Duchess; "and, indeed, if what you say is true, I hardly think Martha Sage has the right to take the initiative in such an affair."

"When I was a little boy—when I was a child," said Mr. Rodney, recovering himself in time to save Lady Sage's vanishing reputation with the Duchess.

"Oh, that's nothing. She has dandled everybody at that age. But she doesn't allow anybody to influence her decisions for all that."

"Then Mrs. Verulam must be kept out of the enclosure," cried Mr. Rodney, wringing his hands together. "She must and shall!"

"That will only delay the matter," said her Grace calmly. "In fact, Mr. Rodney—but this I tell you in the strictest confidence—if I don't observe a very great change in Mrs. Verulam's behaviour during this week, I am very much afraid that I shall be obliged to agree with Martha Sage. Oh, is it tea-time?"

It was this terrible conversation which had reduced Mr. Rodney to making a mal-àpropos reply, a thing he had scarcely ever done before in the whole course of his social life. He was immersed in thought, considering whether he ought not solemnly to warn Mrs. Verulam of her danger, or whether, on the other hand, he should go privately to Lady Sage, recall the dandling incident to her Crimean War recollection, and implore her, for her old intimacy's sake, to be merciful, and to bow to the Ribton Marches party on the morrow. He could not decide. He could not come to a conclusion. And Miss Bindler very soon gave him up in despair, and took to a close and exhaustive study of her betting-book. This study, Mr. Rodney's gloomy agonies, the Duke's jokes, Mr. Ingerstall's recollections of Parisian life and art, and, indeed, everything that was going on in the baronial hall, was, however, interrupted very shortly by the sudden entry of Mr. James Bush, with disordered and earthy costume, breathing stertorously, and looking rather puffy about the cheeks. Mrs. Verulam greeted him with a delighted smile, and was about to make him known to the fresh arrivals, when he broke in upon her "Oh, Mr. Bush, let me intro——" with the loud and rather startling exclamation, uttered in evident bitter sarcasm, "You've got nice company here!"

"What!" said Mrs. Verulam, while the assembled magnates joined in a simultaneous start of astonishment.

"Well, I'm blowed!" continued Mr. Bush. "You've got nice company!"

"I hope so, indeed!" murmured Mrs. Verulam. "Let me make you known to them. Mr. Bush—the Duchess of Southborough, Lady Pearl McAndrew——" She named her guests.

Mr. Bush plunged his head in their direction, without deigning to glance at them.

"Mad, I s'pose!" he resumed to Mrs. Verulam. "Mad as Moses!"

Consternation now reigned among the inmates of the palace, who began to fear that Mr. Bush was giving a name to his own private affliction. Even Mrs. Verulam felt a certain diffidence steal over her at so definite an inclusion of all her party within the sad circle of a supposititious lunacy. But she guessed Mr. Bush to be a bit of a wag, like most great men. Doubtless he was only having his little joke. Still, she felt quite definitely that this fact should be made apparent to the Duchess and others with as short a delay as possible, so she hastened to reply:

"Ah, Mr. Bush, you mustn't make a joke on so serious a subject as madness."

"Joke! There's no joke! Where's the joke of being potted at like a rook in January? Joke, indeed—joke!"

He blew forth a perfect volume of angry breath.

"A rook in January?" said poor Mrs. Verulam, in consummate perplexity, and really beginning to have her fears for her guest's reason.

"Aye. If I'd have stayed he'd have had me. I wasn't eight paces off him."

"Unless the other gentleman was an unusually indifferent shot," remarked the Duke, glancing at Mr. Bush's gigantic bulk, "I must say I think Mr. Bush must have stood in some slight danger. Did you not stay, then?" his Grace added, addressing himself to the narrator.

"Stay? Not I! I just ducked down on all fours, and came back like a beast through the rhododendrons."

"Indeed!" continued the Duke pleasantly. "A very sensible posture and mode of exit under the circumstances. Who's your sportsman?" he added, turning to Mrs. Verulam.

"I have no idea, indeed!" she replied, in perplexity unutterable. "Oh, Mr. Bush!" she added, with a most tender accent of commiseration, "I can scarcely tell you how grieved, how horrified I am that you should have been so nearly murdered—and so soon after your arrival, too!"

"I should think so!" Mr. Bush rejoined angrily. "A nice thing to happen to a respectable man!"

His tacit refusal to be mollified reacted upon his hostess, who, as usual in untoward circumstances, turned instantly upon the man who she thought loved her.

"Mr. Rodney," she said with bitter reproach, "you never told me there was a murderer living in this neighbourhood."

"I never knew it!" cried Mr. Rodney. "It never occurred to me, I do assure you. Where were you?" he exclaimed to Mr. Bush, with the poignant accent of a man whose reputation is at stake.

"I was walkin' in the garden, a-lookin' at the mistakes the gardener here's been makin'," said Mr. Bush sulkily.

"Yes, yes!" chorused the company.

"Presently I came to a bit of a pond, with flowers a-floatin' on it."

"Ah!" suddenly cried Mr. Rodney, in an illuminated manner. "And a cottage on the farther side?"

"Aye; where he fires from."

"The Bun Emperor!" exclaimed Mr. Rodney, as if the matter was settled.

"Very unsportsmanlike behaviour," said Miss Bindler, "to shoot from such cover as that. The game haven't a ghost of a chance."

"You're right, mum," said Mr. Bush, "they haven't—not unless they're as quick at droppin' on all fours as I am."

"But I can't understand it even yet," pursued Mr. Rodney. "The Emperor's really not a bad sort of man, as a general rule. Did you do anything in particular by the pond, Mr. Bush?"

"Not I. I only stood a-lookin' at the little house. I saw a fattish, smallish feller, with a fattish, smallish woman by his side, starin' out——"

"The Empress, too!" said Mr. Rodney. "Well, Mr. Bush?"

"But I didn't take any account of them at first. I put out my stick across the water to lay hold of some of the lilies, when what does the fattish man do but shout out, "If you do it, I'll skin you!" I didn't choose to notice his nonsense, and I'd just got hold of a lily, when what do I see but him with a gun at his shoulder firin' straight at me. So, as I say, I came away like a beast through the bushes."

Mr. Rodney seemed perfectly at ease.

"Mr. Lite always is a little hasty," he said. "The matter is perfectly clear to me. He doesn't like anything being interfered with."

"A defender of the rights of property," said the Duke approvingly. "A good Conservative."

"Still, he goes too far," said Mrs. Verulam, in considerable agitation. "Mr. Rodney, I must ask you to be kind enough to tell Mr. Lite that I cannot have my house-party shot at. Make it perfectly clear, please. As a hostess, I cannot and will not permit anything of that kind."

"Certainly, certainly," said Mr. Rodney; "I see your point of view."

"If you won't have any more tea, it would be very good of you to go to the fishing-cottage at once," said Mrs. Verulam. "Some of us might like to stroll about the grounds presently, and I am sure we shall all prefer to have Mr. Lite's solemn promise of amendment before we do so."

These words were received with an emphatic chorus of unfeigned assent, so poor Mr. Rodney, who had only half finished his first cup, was obliged to get up and fare forth into the afternoon. He went gloomily, feeling that his Ascot this year was evidently to be a period of hard labour, and that Mrs. Verulam, like many women, was inclined to make mountains out of mole-hills. Not that James Bush could be accurately described as a mole-hill. Nevertheless, under the circumstances, Mr. Rodney's sympathies lay very decidedly with Mr. Lite. Indeed, as he walked tealess in the sun, he gradually worked himself up into a perfect fever of perfervid pity for the wrongs of the outraged exile, practically homeless by the waterside, and forced to behold the assaults of such an enemy as the man who had so foully influenced Mrs. Verulam against society. Moved by this wild access of emotion, Mr. Rodney burst into the fishing-cottage like a well-bred volcano, leapt into the tiny parlour which for the moment accommodated the unfortunate Lites, and, seizing Mr. Lite by the hand, exclaimed in a voice that trembled with feeling:

"You have all my sympathy; I am entirely—entirely on your side. If you had hit him, I don't think I could blame you—I don't, indeed!"

The Bun Emperor, who had an enormous pair of strong field-glasses in one hand, and was in the very act of ringing the telephone-bell to summon Mr. Harrison with the other, looked for an instant petrified by this intrusion; and the Empress cried out in shrill alarm from her station in the minute bay-window built to fit a fisherman. Mr. Rodney breathlessly continued:

"I know what you—what any man worthy of the name—must feel on seeing such a—such a—a spectacle, yes, as that man daring to make away with the flowers that have been floating on those waters perhaps for centuries."

The pond was exactly two years and three months old.

"What d'you mean?" gasped Mr. Lite, at length getting in an ejaculation edgewise. "Are you mad?"

"I wish you had shot him—yes, I do!" cried Mr. Rodney, frantically eulogising British assassination; and he threw himself into an adjacent wicker-chair in a most Corsican manner.

The Empress wailed again from her embrasure.

"Oh, Perry, save me—save me!" was her natural cry.

"I will, Henrietta—I will, my love," said the Emperor. "Keep up." After these reassuring words he advanced in a threatening manner upon Mr. Rodney, and remarked: "Give over! D'you hear me? Give over!"

"I beg your pardon," murmured Mr. Rodney, exhausted by his unwonted vocal exertions.

"Give over, or I'll lay my hands on you—I will."

"But I am sympathising with you—I am——"

"Sympathising!" said the Emperor, still maintaining a posture of protection and defence; "what for? what over?"

"Your manly attempt to shoot James Bush," said Mr. Rodney, giving himself away with extraordinary indifference to the opinion of the civilised world on criminal affairs.

At the name the Emperor's manner changed. His black eyes blazed, and he shook the field-glass as if it had been a fist.

"It was him, then," he cried—"it was him as I saw through the telescope!"

"The telescope!" said Mr. Rodney, suddenly penetrated by a ray of light.

He turned rapidly in the wicker-chair, and threw a distracted glance towards the embrasure. In it, reposing upon a window-seat, was an enormous telescope. Mr. Rodney began to comprehend, and to see the necessity of reconsidering his position under these much less violent circumstances.

"Then you didn't fire at him?" he said, with an abrupt lamb-like serenity.

"Fire at him!" said the Emperor. "What are you talking about? When he went for Mrs. Lite's lilies I said I'd skin him; and so I would have, or telephoned Mr. Harrison to, if he hadn't dropped into the ground for all the world like a mole or a badger. I don't know where he went to, though I had my eye to the telescope, and Mrs. Lite she was looking through the field-glasses."

"He behaved like vermin," remarked the Empress at this juncture. "Like a rat he went, he did. Never did I see a Christian demean himself so till this day—never, no!"

"The man's a coward," said Mr. Rodney with firmness—"an arrant coward. I shall inform Mrs. Verulam."

And he suddenly broke from the Emperor and Empress and absconded towards the palace, leaving them immersed in helpless astonishment.

Returning with rapid steps into the baronial hall, he found the party preparing to set forth into the grounds on receiving his assurances that the Emperor had laid aside his gun for the time being.

"You are perfectly safe," said Mr. Rodney, with unwonted sarcasm, and calmly waving one white hand towards the estate; "you will not be hurt, I can promise you. Nobody will attempt to injure you."

The guests were obviously relieved, and they began at once to evaporate, Mr. Ingerstall escorting the Duchess, the Duke with Lady Drake, Chloe accompanying the Lady Pearl, and Miss Bindler bringing up the rear in sturdy solitude. Mr. Bush remained because he had not nearly finished munching his tea, and Mrs. Verulam stayed because she loved to see him munch.

"You have persuaded him, then?" she said approvingly to the ambassador. "I knew you would have weight with him."

But even this compliment could not divert Mr. Rodney from his purpose of unmasking the man who had behaved like a badger in the moment of supposed peril.

"My dear lady," he said, glancing with elaborate pity towards Mr. Bush, who was closely engaged with a tea-cake, "there was nothing to persuade. I am happy to say that you have been totally misinformed as to the circumstances."

"Eh?" growled Mr. Bush, stirring his spoon vigorously in his tea-cup—"eh?"

"Totally and absolutely misinformed," repeated Mr. Rodney with the greatest decision.

"Really, Mr. Rodney," said Mrs. Verulam, preparing to fire up, "what are you saying? Mr. Bush has been shot at."

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Rodney very blandly—"I beg your pardon."

"If I hadn't a dropped, I shouldn't be here now," said Mr. Bush, in a voice whose timbre was slightly obscured by tea-cake.

Mr. Rodney turned towards him.

"I assure you, my dear Mr. Bush," he said, "that you are labouring under an entire delusion; you might with perfect safety have retained an upright posture. It's true that Mr. Lite made use of some hasty, inconsiderate words about skinning."

"There!" roared Mr. Bush; "what did I say?"

"But even they were no doubt rather metaphorical than strictly truthful. As to the firing, however, you were quite mistaken. What you took for a gun was merely a telescope. When you thought you were being shot at, you were only being looked at. There is an appreciable difference between the two operations. I think you will allow that."

And the owner of Mitching Dean calmly dropped into a chair, and prepared to continue his interrupted tea. Mr. Bush looked remarkably sulky under this light of truth.

"Telescope, indeed!" he muttered; "telescope—I daresay!"

"So you see, Mr. Lite can hardly be blamed after all," said Mr. Rodney cheerfully to Mrs. Verulam.

"Perhaps not," she said, a little doubtfully. "However, he should be more careful how he looks at people."

And then she rather hastily dropped the subject. In her secret heart she was sorry to find that the Emperor was not so given to murder as Mr. Bush had led her to suppose. Women love their heroes to stand uprightly even in moments of imminent danger. They infinitely prefer them not to quail before a telescope, however suddenly handled.

Mrs. Verulam could not entirely banish from her heart the uneasy conviction that on this occasion Mr. Bush had scarcely lived up to what she confidently expected of the man who was her idea of Agag.

CHAPTER X.

MR. RODNEY SCREAMS.

That evening in the hall after dinner the Duke chanced to say:

"Another top-hat Ascot! I wish the Prince would set the fashion of billycocks. What do you say, Mr. Bush? Wouldn't you rather have a low hat in the heat? Anything low is always so pleasant—between you and me. Eh? What—what?"

The paragon observed the grinning pantaloon face solemnly, and then answered:

"Top-hats are rubbish. I've only brought a straw."

Mr. Rodney turned as pale as ashes.

"I sha'n't wear nought but a straw to-morrer," proceeded the paragon with heavy calmness.

"A savage custom?" squeaked Lady Drake enquiringly.

"I hate a man to be over-dressed," ejaculated Miss Bindler approvingly.

"I beg your pardon," Mr. Rodney said suddenly, in a trembling voice—"I beg your pardon, but I must venture to say that I feel certain Major Clement will turn a—a straw off the lawn. Knowing him as I do, I feel confidently certain of it." And he cast a glance of passionate beseeching upon Mrs. Verulam.

For once she came to his rescue.

"I quite agree with Mr. Bush," she said; "a straw is much more sensible—"

"Merciful heavens!" in an under cry of acute anguish from Mr. Rodney.

"In every way. But at the same time, Mr. Bush, don't you think that custom should occasionally be adhered to?"

"Eh?"

"Every man will be wearing a top-hat to-morrow."

Mr. Bush began to look very sulky.

"I've hoed and I've planted in a straw for thirty year," he muttered, "day in, day out."

"There's no hoeing and planting on a racecourse," said Mr. Rodney, with vehement sarcasm.

"It'd make the going a bit heavy," said Miss Bindler reflectively.

"I fancy, Mr. Bush," said Mrs. Verulam very gently, "that, as you will not have any opportunity of hoeing at the races to-morrow, owing to all the silly rules and regulations, you will find it really pleasanter to be as everyone else is—I mean only, of course, as regards your head-covering."

"I haven't a-brought one," he mumbled; "I say I've only brought a straw."

"We must send a man to Windsor," said Mr. Rodney, with a sudden piercing decision, and he pushed eighteen times at an electric bell. The powdered Frederick appeared.

"Kindly bring us a yard measure," said Mr. Rodney.

"A what, sir?" exclaimed the man.

"A yard measure, and order a dogcart round; there is much to do to-night."

The powdered Frederick dropped his lower jaw like one confronted with the mysteries of Udolpho, and fled to execute these sinister commands. He returned, accompanied by Mr. Harrison, who had impounded a yard measure with his left hand, and whose eyes were starting out of his head with suspicion. The house-party were now tense with excitement as medical students gathered to witness the operation of the century. Only Mr. Rodney was wrapped in a white and still calm; he held out his long thin hand for the yard measure, but Mr. Harrison showed a bold front.

"Mr. Lite's last orders to me, sir," he began, shaking his bald head emphatically—"his last orders to me was: 'On no account, Mr. Harrison, is the carriages to be measured. Oh, by no means must it be so done—oh, indeed, on no account whatever!'"

"The carriages!" said Mr. Rodney, getting very red at this speech for the defence—"the carriages! It is this gentleman's head!" He pointed to the paragon.

"I understood, sir, from Frederick that the dogcart—oh, indeed, was ordered to be——"

But at this point Mr. Rodney snatched the tape from the protecting hand that secluded it, advanced heroically upon the paragon, measured the circumference of his enormous cranium, wrote the measurement down with a gold pencil on a sheet of writing-paper, gave it to the powdered Frederick, said: "Have that taken at once to Windsor, rouse up the best hatter in the royal borough, buy a top-hat of that size, and bring it back as fast as the horse can gallop," and then sank down on a sofa with the air of a man who, having stormed the heights, dies of his own bravery as he grasps the standard of the enemy.

"A glass of water," he murmured.

It was brought. He recovered, and shortly afterwards the spectators of the operation of the century retired to their respective bedrooms, conscious that they had been assisting at a historical event, but a little divided as to the complete tact and generalship shown by Mr. Rodney.

That night, when the faithful Marriner came into the primrose bedroom to brush Mrs. Verulam's pretty hair before the latter went to bed, she found her mistress in a very serious mood. And, on her side, Marriner was also unusually grave, although her demeanour, chastened as it was by Schopenhauer and an acquaintance with Nordau which might almost be termed intimate, was invariably and at all times sedate and thoughtful. Chloe had adroitly avoided the smoking-room, in which the Duke was now telling stories to Mr. Ingerstall; while Mr. Rodney wrote up his diary, and Mr. Bush dreamed over a whisky and soda of gigantic proportions. Mr. Harrison, above stairs, was with much tribulation and uncurled whiskers preparing his report to lay before the Emperor at eight o'clock on the following morning. The Duchess was asleep. Miss Bindler was considering the chances of the morrow. The Lady Pearl was dreaming softly of the person whom, in secret, she now named Huskinson; and Lady Drake, who though acid had an extraordinarily sweet tooth, was eating chocolate creams in a dressing-gown made from an Indian shawl presented to her by a very great personage indeed.

The faithful Marriner removed a hairpin and breathed a sigh simultaneously. Mrs. Verulam echoed the sigh, and hearing that she had been honoured with an echo, Marriner ventured to say:

"Oh, ma'am!"

"Why do you say 'Oh,' Marriner?" said Mrs. Verulam. "What should you have to say 'oh' about?"

"Many things, ma'am—many, many things," responded Marriner in a doleful voice.

"Have any more thoughts been taking you like a storm, Marriner?"

"They have indeed, ma'am."

"If you think so much you ought to keep a lifeboat by you," said Mrs. Verulam dreamily.

For her hair was now being brushed and was giving off electricity, and the process soothed her.

"Might I speak, ma'am?" said Marriner, making use of her habitual formula when she had anything special to say.

"You may, certainly."

"Ma'am," said Marriner, "I've heard a dreadful thing this night."

"Dreadful! What about?"

"Oh, ma'am, that I should have to say it—about you!" replied the faithful creature, with every outward sign of extreme dejection.

Mrs. Verulam started beneath the brush.

"A dreadful thing about me, Marriner! Who from?"

"From Mrs. Crouch, ma'am, her Grace's woman."

"Why, what should Mrs. Crouch say about me?"

"Oh, ma'am, she says, ma'am, that Lady Sage is—is——"

"Don't break down, Marriner, you'll wet my hair. Please go on."

Thus adjured, Marriner continued in a fragmentary voice, as one relating something almost too improper to be given tongue to:

"She says that—oh, that Lady Sage is going to have nothing at all to do with you in the Enclosure to-morrow, ma'am—oh dear, dear me!"

Mrs. Verulam sat still in silence for a moment. It must be confessed that during the moment she felt as if she was being whipped.

"Oh, ma'am, don't go—don't go there!" continued Marriner. "We should not place ourselves between the feet of our enemies, ma'am; no, no, we should not!"

"Be careful with the brush, Marriner, please," said Mrs. Verulam in a rather low voice.

"But that's not all, ma'am—there is worse, ma'am—there is treachery, indeed, and there is treason, ma'am."

"Really, one would think that Guy Fawkes was staying in the house," rejoined Mrs. Verulam, recovering herself a little.

"No, ma'am, indeed it is not him."

"Then who is it?"

"Oh, ma'am—her Grace."

"The Duchess!" said Mrs. Verulam in slight surprise.

"Yes, ma'am; Mrs. Crouch says, indeed, that her Grace will do as her Ladyship—Lady Sage—does, when the week is over, ma'am. And it is all because of Mrs. Van Adam—taking her for a man, ma'am. Oh, do—please, please do tell them, ma'am!"

"The teeth of the comb! Be careful, Marriner, please!"

"Yes, ma'am, I will. But I do implore you, ma'am, if I might——"

"Hush!" cried Mrs. Verulam suddenly; "let me think! Brush softly, Marriner, if you have any regard for me."

Marriner brushed softly, and Mrs. Verulam thought for a long while, hating Lady Sage and the Duchess for themselves, womanlike, yet half-inclined—or tricking herself to think so—to love their coming deed. James Bush, too, and the squirrel Tommy, and the cage door, and the different, the true, earnest, sincere, unaffected life—thoughts of all these ran through that pretty head beneath the shining hair, until the weary brusher ceased, and Mrs. Verulam said, "You may go to bed, Marriner; good night."

In consequence of Marriner's revelation, when, on the following morning, shortly before the Ribton Marches party started for the course, Mr. Rodney mysteriously begged to be allowed to speak with Mrs. Verulam alone, she was not much surprised by what he had to say, although, for some perhaps feminine reason, she pretended to be so.

"Could I have just a word with you?" Mr. Rodney said, in a voice not wholly unlike that of a sucking dove.

"Certainly," replied Mrs. Verulam. "Where?"

"I think there is no one in the pink boudoir."

"Let us go there, then."

They went, furtively watched by Mr. Harrison, who had just returned from the fishing-cottage in possession of that rather unacceptable belonging usually called a flea in the ear. For he had found the Emperor in a terrible condition of fury over the James Bush business and various other incidents of the preceding day. When Mrs. Verulam and Mr. Rodney had gained the pink boudoir, the latter carefully closed the pink door, walked very gently up to Mrs. Verulam, and said:

"Where do you think of watching the races from, may I venture to ask?"

"Where from? The Enclosure, of course!"

"Shall we sit down for a moment?" replied Mr. Rodney, with a consummate endeavour after genial ease.

They sat down on a couple of flesh-coloured chairs and he proceeded with extraordinary blandness:

"The Enclosure! Don't you think it is likely to be excessively hot?"

Mrs. Verulam instantly guessed that Mr. Rodney knew what the faithful Marriner knew.

"Hot," she said, "why specially hot in the Enclosure?"

"Well, you know, in consequence of its being so difficult to gain admission to, it is so very much more crowded than any other part of the course. Don't you think so?"

"Well, but where else shall I go?"

"I have ventured to take a couple of excellent boxes. You see one or two of our party, Mr. Ingerstall and Mr. Bush, have not got cards for the Enclosure."

Mr. Rodney just glanced at his boots. Mrs. Verulam had never liked him better than at this moment. Nevertheless, she was a woman, and, as all her sex, sweetly mischievous.

"It is very good and thoughtful of you; still, I think I shall go to the Enclosure. Mr. Van Adam is anxious to see what it is like."

Mr. Rodney stiffened.

"Indeed!"

"And then there are all one's friends there—Lady Clondart and Lady Sage, and——"

Mr. Rodney became as cold as the adventurer who approaches the Pole. He saw Mrs. Verulam rushing headlong to her doom, and he did not know how to stop her.

"Lady Sage grows a little wearisome, I fancy," he murmured dissuasively.

"Do you think so? Oh, I love her recollections!"

"I think her too historical for hot summer weather, I confess," continued Mr. Rodney; "and then her insatiable appetite for dates."

"Oh, surely she wouldn't eat them in the Enclosure!" cried Mrs. Verulam. "The Master of the Buckhounds would never permit it!"

"The dates of battles, dear lady, not dried fruits. Really, if you prefer to go to the Enclosure, I strongly—very strongly—advise you to avoid Lady Sage. She is agreeable in a drawing-room, but very, very Crimean, I do assure you, on a racecourse. Do give me your word; I cannot bear to see you bored!"

"You are all kindness," said Mrs. Verulam, secretly longing to pat this kind and true friend upon his anxious face. "I must go to the Enclosure, but I shall probably not see Lady Sage. Now, the carriages must be round."

Mr. Rodney, in his usual soft manner, opened the pink door, and was instantly confronted by Mr. Harrison, who, with tightly-shut eyes, was revealed in a crouched attitude with his left ear glued to what, had the door been shut, would doubtless have been the keyhole. This surprising vision caused Mr. Rodney to start, and the groom of the chambers, in some obvious confusion, assumed a less attentive posture, and added:

"I was about to inform you, sir—in the temporary absence of all the men-servants—that the carriages are now before the door—oh, most certainly!"

He then proceeded to retire with a deliberate but distinct celerity.

"That man is really of a very original turn of body," remarked Mrs. Verulam, as they went downstairs.

"He carries it too far, in my opinion," replied Mr. Rodney, with considerable severity.

That day was to Mr. Rodney a day of trial and of acute anxiety. It might truly be said that he did not have one moment's peace during the whole course of it. He attended Mrs. Verulam into the Enclosure, which was, as he had foreseen, most uncomfortably full and crowded, and spent his time there in a faithful endeavour to emulate the procedure of the trained private detective. His eye, to which he tried to give that unmarkable acuteness attributed to the eye of the lynx, was ever upon the look-out for the approach of Lady Sage, and when he saw that redoubtable survival of pre-Crimean days moving afar off beneath a huge bonnet in form like a helmet, he ingeniously glided Mrs. Verulam into some other part of the royal pen, engaging her the while vigorously in conversation, and leading unsuspecting countesses and others to cover up her tracks in a masterly manner. Being a man, he thought that she was quite unaware that for four hours she was subtly being dodged about, and when at length the last race was over, and he placed her in the barouche, he fancied that the sigh of triumph which he could not help breathing was supposed by her to be merely a tribute to the heat.

The great lawn that stretched before the glittering windows of the palace; the mighty cedar-tree beneath which the powdered Frederick and his fellow menials now arranged the tea-tables—these works of Nature appeared exceedingly charming to the dusty eyes of the Ribton Marches house-party as they flocked anxiously out to refresh themselves after the torments of a day of pleasure. But not all had returned. Mr. James Bush and Mr. Ingerstall were absent. Lady Drake, exceedingly acidulated in airy black; the Duchess, full of bass conversation about the events of the day, but ever watchful of Chloe and Mrs. Verulam; Miss Bindler and the Duke talking racing; Chloe and the Lady Pearl—all these gathered round and sank in various attitudes of marked prostration into garden chairs. But the hero from the Bungay Marshes and the thickset person from Paris were nowhere to be seen.

"Where are Mr. Bush and Mr. Ingerstall?" said Mrs. Verulam, looking round.

"I can't imagine," said Mr. Rodney peacefully, as Frederick placed the magnificent grapes from Mitching Dean upon one of the little tables near a rose-bush.

"I daresay Mr. Bush is on a roundabout," said the Duchess. "You say he is fond of being rustic, Mrs. Verulam?"

"Yes; but not in that way, I hope."

"It all goes together, love of the country and a passion for riding wooden horses painted yellow to the sound of comic songs. Depend upon it, Mr. Bush is on a roundabout."

Mrs. Verulam began to look very anxious.

"Dear me!" she exclaimed, turning towards Mr. Rodney, "I do hope—Mr. Rodney, don't you think, perhaps——"

Now, Mr. Rodney, beneath all his breeding, was human. He didn't know it, but he was, and upon this occasion he revealed the fact.

He was at this moment, when Mrs. Verulam addressed him, very busily engaged in being happy, and he was determined not to be interrupted in this activity. His tired limbs were caressed by a charming chair, into which he fitted quite perfectly. A soft breeze played about his carefully-parted hair. His eyes were dazzled by the beautiful grapes grown in his own hot-houses, and his heart was cradled in the arms of success. Dreamlike he felt, softly rapturous, as the tired but triumphant gladiator. The desperate past, haunted by Lady Sage, lay behind him; tea, sugar, bread-and-butter, a future tenderly bright, lay before. And should he allow even the woman whom he loved to send him forth again to those arid stretches of dusty landscape, there to quest among the perspiring vulgar for a great rustic bumpkin astride an orange or blue horse, revolving furiously in the heat to the sound of the music of the lower spheres? No, no. Rather annihilation.

Under the stress of this definite determination, therefore, he said with unusual firmness:

"If Mr. Bush is fond of horse-exercise, I certainly think he should be permitted to enjoy it in all freedom. Probably it is his custom to ride on a roundabout every day. Dear me, tea is very refreshing on these occasions!"

Mrs. Verulam was checkmated. She had never seen Mr. Rodney so masterful before.

"There's a great deal of knack in sitting a wooden horse," said the Duke. "Some people can never acquire it. I knew a very excellent clergyman who was thrown three times running by a deal cob which his cook rode perfectly at the very first try."

"You ought always to give a horse of that material his head," said Miss Bindler, taking out a hunting-flask and pouring something yellow into her tea. "If you try to hold him in you're done. Had a good day?" she added to Mr. Rodney.

"Perfect!" said that gentleman celestially—"quite, quite perfect!"

"What, after backing Cubicle?"

"Absolutely perfect!"

"How much did you clear on all the results?"

"Clear?"

"Yes—pouch."

"Pouch?" said Mr. Rodney as in a happy dream—"pouch?"

"Did you have anything on Lambton and Try your Luck? Did you go for Mulligatawney?"

"No, no; I didn't go for Mulligatawney."

"Well, then, I'm—I don't see how you had a good day," said Miss Bindler, giving him up and turning again to the Duke.

"Do you like Ascot, Mr. Van Adam?" said the Lady Pearl, with unusual vivacity.

"It's heavenly," cried Chloe; "it's like a dream."

"Have you nothing of the kind in America?"

"How can we, when we have no aristocracy? Oh, I should like to make it my life's mission to create a grand American aristocracy, with grades, a Debrett, and everything complete. I would travel, I would hold meetings, I would stir up the splendid class feeling that makes England what it is, I would leave no stone unturned, I would begin by getting baronets for my dear native land—they should be the thin end of the wedge, and everything else would follow."

Her cheeks flushed with enthusiasm, and her eyes sparkled as she unbuttoned her frock-coat, and flung it open with the gesture of a born orator. The Lady Pearl caught the infection of the missionary spirit.

"Mr. Van Adam," she said, "you should have lived in the olden days. You should have led Crusaders."

"To Burke instead of battle, an army to armorial bearings. Oh!"

She drank her tea in a soft frenzy, which went straight to the heart of the Lady Pearl.

The Duchess, who had observed these noble raptures with satisfaction, looked narrowly at Mrs. Verulam.

"Is Mr. Van Adam to be much longer with you?" she asked.

"I am afraid not in London," said Mrs. Verulam. "But we may go over to Paris together in a week or two."

"Indeed!" said her Grace, flushing with respectable fury—"indeed!"

"Or on the Continent," continued Mrs. Verulam, with pretty malice, as she thought of the faithful Marriner's midnight remarks.

Her Grace heaved, and Mr. Rodney woke suddenly from his dreams, and spilt some tea over his boots. Was Mrs. Verulam mad? For a moment he dreaded that the Duchess would lose her head and make a scene, for the famous features became enlarged with passion. Her Grace's form was agitated like an enormous flower in a strong wind, and she opened her capacious mouth as if to allow egress to a stream of eloquent remarks of an opprobrious nature.

But, unfortunately, her curses were lost to an enquiring world, for at this moment Mr. Bush and Mr. Ingerstall emerged from the palace and came towards the group on the lawn with a demeanour which attracted the attention of all. The artist looked wildly hilarious. His enormous spectacles were dimmed with tears of laughter, and his frantic bow-tie streamed abroad in a manner suggestive of unbridled licence. Mr. Bush's gigantic countenance, on the other hand, was marked by its usual solid gravity. But the hat from Windsor perched on the side of his head like a wounded bird, battered and forlorn; his clothes seemed to have been hurriedly put on during the active progress of an earthquake; one or two buttons had burst off his boots, and he carried in his hands what appeared at a distance to be a large number of cannon-balls, but as he approached resolved themselves into various cocoanuts, such as grow so plentifully in all places where the sinews of Great Britain assemble to have a good time. All eyes were now riveted upon these nuts, two or three of which Mr. Bush let drop on Mr. Rodney's toes as he gained the tea-table. Miss Bindler was the first to break the awed silence which reigned beneath the cedar-tree.

"Been betting in kind?" she said to Mr. Bush. "Taking the odds in fruit? Not a bad idea, if you're keen on it. I shouldn't mind having a bit on Kiss Me to-morrow—say in gooseberries."

Mr. Bush sat down in silence in a wicker chair and nursed his nuts, while Mr. Rodney, with an approach to violence, kicked away that portion of the winnings which had bruised his delicate feet.

"I would give one year—yes, one whole year—of my caricaturing life," shrieked Mr. Ingerstall, "to take Mr. Bush round the side-shows of Montmartre. How he would appreciate their subtle beauty! He has the artistic sense; he understands the exquisite poetry of vulgarity, the inwardness of the cocoanut-shy, the extraordinary elements of the picturesque which appear in the staring face of Madame Aunt Sally, open-mouthed to receive the provender shot at her by Hodge and Harriet. He knows well the bizarre and beautiful effect upon the nervous system of that strange combination of the arts of music and motion—the roundabout! He——"

"The roundabout?" interrupted the Duchess. "Didn't I say so?"

"You've been riding?" said the Duke to Mr. Bush. "Good exercise—good for the liver! good for the muscles! Did you get a decent horse?"

Mr. Bush burst forth into a loud guffaw.

"Splendid animal!" cried Mr. Ingerstall. "I rode a pink, he a delicate—a really very delicate—apple-green, with sulphur-coloured spots. The music was that extremely pathetic composition 'Write me a letter from home.' I should have preferred 'Quand les amoureux s'en vont deux par deux'; still, the other really did very well. After dismounting—Bush was thrown, by the way—we spent half an hour in a tent with the bottle imp. Paris would like it. And then we passed on to the two-faced lady, ending up with a cocoanut-shy, which Whistler would love to paint. I really never enjoyed an Ascot so much—never!"

He swallowed a cup of tea as a Soudanese miracle-worker swallows an impromptu bonfire, and leaned back, extending his short legs towards the west, as if in compliment to the approaching sunset. Mrs. Verulam looked with glistening approval at Mr. Bush.

"How original you are," she murmured; "and how bravely simple!" She turned to the house-party. "Should we not all learn to find pleasure in—in what Nature provides for us," she exclaimed, "instead of creating artificial amusements to—to titillate our baser appetites?"

"Does Nature provide apple-green animals with sulphur-coloured spots?" asked Chloe innocently, stroking the place where she was supposed to shave meditatively with her forefinger.

"Nature," said Mr. Rodney, in a voice that quivered and was hoarse with horror—"Nature is—is really scarcely decent."

Mrs. Verulam's approval of Mr. Bush's abominable and Neronic orgy shook him to the soul. That she should praise bottle imps, two-faced females, and speak of the royal Enclosure as ministering to our baser appetites! Even the Mitching Dean grapes lost their colour, their peculiar sweetness, for the moment.

"And all the better for that," began the Duke in his most St. John's Wood manner.

"Lady Drake," said Mrs. Verulam a little hastily, "have you seen the fish-pond? I believe it is lovely; and I know how fond you are of fish-ponds. I wonder if the Duke——"

The hint was sufficient. Lady Drake immediately began to worry the Duke, and the situation was saved.

All the party were now in that condition of physical refreshment which leads human beings to think complacently of gentle movement. They rustled like leaves in a forest, and this rustling was a preliminary to a general uprising. Lady Drake carried off the Duke as the chariot and horses carried off Elijah. The Duchess, under the stress of some sudden mental prompting, swooped in a dignified manner upon Chloe. Mr. Bush composed himself to rest with a cake in each hand. Lady Pearl, Miss Bindler, and Mr. Ingerstall formed a somewhat unsympathetic trio, and trundled towards an adjoining orchid-house; and Mr. Rodney, still trembling and horror-stricken, strolled tragically forward with Mrs. Verulam into the Bun Emperor's rose garden, Number 4. (All the rose gardens were numbered at Ribton Marches.)

Mrs. Verulam was glowing, Mr. Rodney glowering. The former was full of James Bush, the latter of intense and shrinking disgust. These feelings rather clashed in the soft light which now began to fall over the scented garden.

"The true path of pleasure," began Mrs. Verulam in an inward voice, "lies where we never seek it—far, far away from the shams and the conventions with which we surround our little lives. Oh! why—why are we so blind?"

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Rodney; "I can see perfectly well, and I must really venture to say that——"

"You think you can see," interrupted Mrs. Verulam in soft rebuke, "as the blind man does when he mistakes men for trees walking."

"I never made any such mistake," Mr. Rodney rejoined with unwonted vivacity; "I never in my life supposed that I saw a tree taking active exercise. Really, I must protest——"

"Your very protestations prove your sad condition, and the sad condition of all in our world," Mrs. Verulam went on intellectually; "but I, at least, will be blind no longer. Mr. Bush shall open my eyes."

Mr. Rodney gasped. He felt that the time had indeed arrived for him to speak out.

"Mrs. Verulam," he began—"Mrs. Verulam, I must—forgive me."

"For what?" she sweetly queried.

"I must, indeed—I must speak. Are you—can you be aware of what society will inevitably say if you permit a—a man—of Mr. Bush's—er—appearance, or, indeed, any man to open your eyes? Society will not permit these—these unwarrantable—forgive me—unwarrantable liberties. The line will be drawn—it will, indeed. Let me implore you to realise this before it is too late—let me implore you, if I have any influence!"

He quite broke down, and trod on a valuable verbena.

"Society calls crimes virtuous, and virtues criminal," said Mrs. Verulam.

"Oh, pardon me—pardon me!" he babbled.

"Yes, it does. True virtue is simple, frank, unashamed."

"Ah, ah! unashamed in the—the very shocking way of Eve before her very desirable—if I may say so—fall," cried Mr. Rodney.

"Mr. Bush stands to me for virtue," added Mrs. Verulam irrepressibly.

This was too much for Mr. Rodney. He stood stock still like one struck with paralysis.

"Mr. Bush!" he stuttered. "Then what does Mr. Van Adam stand for?"

"Chloe—er—Mr. Van Adam! What has he to say to the matter?"

"Oh, Mrs. Verulam, everything, everything! It is time, I see—it is time—I must—I ought to tell you the truth."

"Please do so."

He hesitated for a moment, passing a cambric pocket-handkerchief across his pallid lips; then he said:

"At least, let us come into the shade."

That "at least" gave the man's soul in a couple of words. He felt all the terror of his coming revelation. Mrs. Verulam assented, and they moved to a little grove of shrubs, monkey-trees, and other indigenous plants which grew near by. Here the sun was less ardent; here a soft breeze blew kindly; but here also something else occurred, which gave Mr. Rodney time to compose himself a little. As they came into this seclusion, artificially induced by the genius of the Bun Emperor's landscape-gardener, an unexpected vision burst upon their eyes. Beneath a monkey-tree of superb proportions, in a hammock suspended between substantial supports, they beheld Mr. Harrison laid out at full length smoking a large cigar in semi-unconsciousness, while the faithful Marriner alternately rocked him gently the while she hummed a crooning lullaby, and stroked the surface of his bald and dome-like head with the palm of her delicate hand. For a moment the charm of this quite unexpected fairy scene so enervated Mrs. Verulam and Mr. Rodney that they remained motionless in contemplation of it. The rhythmically rocking groom of the chambers, the shrill and monotonous cry of the lady's-maid in the sultry summer evening, created a sort of magical, unreal atmosphere. The slanting light, too, caught the bald head, and transformed it almost into the likeness of a globe of some glittering material. And as it swayed solemnly to-and-fro like the pendulum of a clock, in obedience to the motion given by the faithful Marriner to the hammock, it laid a hypnotic spell upon these two who gazed at it.

"Sleep, oh, sleep! it's never too late for that; Sleep, yes, sleep, with your head upon the mat! For the workman's train is passing nigh, And the early milkman gives his cry, You'll be taken to quod when the copper comes by, So sleep, yes, slee-eep!"

sang Marriner tenderly, and Mr. Harrison did all he knew to be obedient. He dozed, and was rapidly proceeding towards the most profound condition of slumber, when Mr. Rodney, whether by accident or design, coughed rather loudly. At this unearthly sound, Marriner, who was half dreaming while she sang, was greatly startled. Surprise released her limbs from her control, and the arm that rocked the hammock shot suddenly forward with such violence that Mr. Harrison was ejected from his delicious position, and, executing a clever turn in the air, alighted at full length upon the ground, face downwards, with a noise that was surprising. Mrs. Verulam looked reproachfully at Mr. Rodney, while the faithful Marriner fell on her knees beside the groom of the chambers.

"Oh, he's dead!" she wailed. And she, too, turned on Mr. Rodney. "You've killed him, sir!" she shrieked respectfully.

"I am very sorry," said Mr. Rodney. "I didn't intend."

At this juncture Mr. Harrison lifted his face from the earth, sat round so that they could see his indignant expression, heaved himself forward upon his knees, and then, planting his hands, palms downwards, upon the ground, and using them as a lever, straightened his legs very deliberately, and was presently successful in standing upon his feet. He made no remark after this elaborate acrobatic performance, but gave Mr. Rodney a markedly malignant glance, and then shambled away among the monkey-trees till he was lost to sight. Marriner, meanwhile, stood by looking downcast.

"I am sure, ma'am," she said at length, "if I had surmised that the races would conclude so early, I should never——"

"You can go, Marriner," said Mrs. Verulam. "I had no idea you had such a pretty singing voice."

"If I might speak, ma'am."

"Certainly, Marriner."

"I learnt from going to hear Madame Albani, ma'am, at the Albert Hall on my evenings out."

And she slipped away, carrying with her an atmosphere of curious cultivation.

"That man is very offensive, very!" said Mr. Rodney with feeling.

"For being thrown out of the hammock?"

"He had no business to be in it. Servants should not go about sleeping all over the place in their masters' gardens. This sort of thing is never permitted at Mitching Dean."

"Oh, I like to see the humble enjoying themselves," said Mrs. Verulam with vague beneficence, a little forgetful, perhaps, of Mr. Harrison's natural self-importance and late severe accident. "But what were you going to say to me?"

And she sat down on a rustic seat made from the trunk of a tree all knobs. Mr. Rodney perched in a distressed manner upon one of the branches, and said dolefully:

"Really, all this—this tumult has quite put it out of my head."

"You wished, I think, to tell me the truth about something," said Mrs. Verulam in an assisting voice.

"I believe so—yes, I thought it my duty," began Mr. Rodney.

He was now in cold blood, owing to the late hammock episode, and found it difficult to say what would have been easy enough when he was in what was for him a passion. He ran one long hand over a dozen or so of the knobs, feeling them like a phrenologist.

"I really considered it my bounden duty," he continued very plaintively, with an accent on the "bounden."

"Yes?" said Mrs. Verulam with calm innocence.

"To—to tell you what—what the world is saying," said Mr. Rodney in marked discomfort.

"About me?"

"About you and—and Mr. Van Adam."

"Indeed! What should it say?"

"Very, very dreadful things!" said Mr. Rodney, almost blushing.

"Dear me! How very absurd!" she cried lightly.

"Indeed!" said Mr. Rodney, with more courage. "It is not absurd." He thought of his hours of furtive precaution in the royal Enclosure. "Far, far from it! I hardly like to tell you——"

"Please do."

"Well," commenced Mr. Rodney, with the manner of a budding anarchist throwing his first bomb, "Lady Sage and one or two others—leading la——" he thought of the Era, and hastily substituted "leading women, take the matter so seriously that—oh, my dear Mrs. Verulam, do pray forgive me! they are actually intending not to see you—when you are there, you understand."

"They want to cut me, in fact?"

Mr. Rodney really blushed and was silent, giving consent.

"If they do so, what will follow?" said Mrs. Verulam, with a great deal of apparent composure.

"Follow!" cried Mr. Rodney, with all his force and eloquence. "Death!"

"Indeed! Is Lady Sage to be the corpse, or am I?"

"You!" he exclaimed. "Oh, Mrs. Verulam, think of it! Social death, ostracism, exile—er—er——" He tried to think of further words bearing a similar signification, but failing, added: "Do you realise my meaning? Do you see the gulf that is opening out beneath your very feet?"

"Indeed I do, with very great pleasure."

"Pleasure!"

The word rose from him in a male scream.

"Who is being murdered?" remarked the deep voice of the Duchess, who at this instant became visible threading her way through the shrubs with Chloe at her side.

CHAPTER XI.

MR. HARRISON'S NIGHT-WATCH.

From this terrible moment despair began to grip Mr. Rodney, and the worst of it was, that besides being in despair, he was in confusion. He now fully recognised that Mrs. Verulam was suffering under a "possession," as he called it to himself. What he could not decide was, which of those two demons, Huskinson Van Adam and James Bush, it was who possessed her with demoniacal influence. Lady Sage was about to cut Mrs. Verulam because of Mr. Van Adam. Society would certainly follow Lady Sage's lead on the same account. But Mr. Rodney's penetration had almost convinced him that the man from Bungay was, in truth, the Svengali to this Trilby. It was surely his enormous shadow in which Mrs. Verulam now walked. It was his fatal rusticity which she envied, his sheep-washing, bee-swarming, cabbage-digging, pea-podding existence she aimed at. This was so. But then, why should she compromise herself with this divorced Huskinson? Why should she lead him about whithersoever she went? Poor Mr. Rodney began "turning, turning in mazes of heat and sound." He yearned for the informing letter from Lord Bernard Roche which tarried so long upon the way. Nevertheless, when it came, this letter only increased the darkness in which events moved—at the first.

In fact, all things tended towards complication in and about the palace at this time. And although Mr. Rodney, in the usual manner of men, flattered himself that he alone of all the universe was truly troubled in spirit, he was entirely mistaken. Mrs. Verulam was secretly exercised at the apparent success which was about to crown her endeavours to leave the milieu in which Heaven had placed her. The Lady Pearl was, or imagined herself to be, swept by the mysterious tremors of a budding affection. The Duchess was in a simmering state of fury against her hostess, and of match-making anxiety on her daughter's behalf. And before the week was out Chloe was struck by a thunder-bolt—metaphorically. At the moment, however, Mr. Rodney was to some extent correct in considering himself the most unhappy person within the precincts of the palace. On this Tuesday night he probably was, as he sat down to dinner, pale, seedy, and bemuddled.

Her Grace was in a certain mental confusion. That afternoon in the shrubbery she had been "sounding" Chloe, as she called it. That is to say, she had been asking Chloe a very large number of extremely leading questions in a very determined bass voice. Chloe had been obliged to hear herself characterised as a very rascally woman, and to receive to herself the flood of pity intended for her ex-husband. She had also been informed that the victim of one unfortunate marriage should instantly seek for happiness in another and more judicious union. And she had learned the catalogue of the Lady Pearl's perfections. According to her mother, the Lady Pearl's only fault was a slight tendency to hereditary gout, and that, as her Grace very justly observed, was glorified in a manner by the fact that it was distinctly filial.

"The Duke has always been a victim to it, Mr. Van Adam," she exclaimed with undoubted force, "and Pearl has been accustomed from a child to look up to her father as to a being almost sacred."

The apparent deduction to be drawn from this sound reasoning was, that if from childhood you look up to a sacred being—who has the gout—you will be rewarded by receiving the sacred being's complaint; a somewhat unsatisfactory state of things, which, however, has this advantage, that it places you in the excellent position of being an undoubted martyr. Chloe had done her best not to give any encouragement to the determined hopes of the Duchess, but her gay delight in titles made it so difficult for her to resist the seductions of one so venerable as the title of Southborough, that she left upon her Grace an impression that there was nothing in the Verulam business on her side. This made the Duchess highly generous to Chloe, but hardly blunted her anger against Mrs. Verulam, who was, no doubt, deliberately trying to snatch the American away from the Lady Pearl. The Duchess's spirit was up in arms against such paltry kleptomania. She was resolved to protect the supposed orange-grower from such wicked designs; and on Tuesday night her bosom swelled with mingled determination and enmity as she solaced her spirit with mayonnaise and '84 champagne.

Mrs. Verulam paid but little heed to the Duchess's physical indications of mental excitement. To-night she was engrossed with the desire to show James Bush, her hero, off to this world ignorant of what a real man can be. So far, Mr. Bush had borne himself bravely and naturally on the whole, the telescope episode alone excepted. His treatment of Ascot had been specially fine and noble. It is not every man, indeed, who has the courage to forsake the gaieties of a box close to the winning-post, the glories of the lawn, for the retired tent of the two-faced lady and the painted charms of the roundabout. It is not every man who has the intrepidity to give the ring the cold shoulder, and the beautiful simplicity to return to a palace at eventide, laden, like the spies of old, with the ripe fruits of Mother Earth—the cocoanuts of a Land of Promise. Already James Bush had betrayed the grandeur of his nature, but Mrs. Verulam was anxious to display every side of this character, so multifarious in beauty. And accordingly, that night after dinner, when the men came into the hall, she began to address herself rather pointedly to her hero, while Mr. Rodney sat writhing with jealousy in the immediate neighbourhood.

"Duchess," she said, "Mr. Bush, you must know, is full of maxims."

"Dear me! Is he related to a copy-book?" replied her Grace lethargically.

"Oh no! Not maxims of that kind. His are founded upon observation of life and knowledge of the world—that is to say, of the beautiful earth. Aren't they, Mr. Bush?"

"There's nought like pea-poddin'," replied that gentleman judicially.

Attired in a dress suit of strikingly original conception and cut, some sizes too small for his large frame, but well adapted to emphasise its enormous bulk, he was spread out upon a huge settee in an attitude of brilliant abandonment. The Duke was beside him, and Lady Drake close by. Mrs. Verulam saw that everybody, reduced to a readiness for comtemplative silence by much dinner, was listening with apparent attention. A bright resolve came to her. She would induce James Bush to show fully his true grand self, to illuminate them all with the light that flamed from a great soul.

"Yes?" she said encouragingly. "Yes?"

Thus adjured, Mr. Bush added, after a moment of deep thought:

"Look after the sheep, and the sheep'll look after you!"

"It sounds like 'Diana of the Crossways,'" piped Lady Drake in her acidulated manner.

"I don't know that I should care to be looked after by a sheep," said Miss Bindler practically, as she lit a small cigar. "I don't consider a sheep to be an efficient animal."

"They want a deal of mindin'," said Mr. Bush—"a deal of mindin'."

"Because they have no minds," said the Duke, yawning as a mask yawns in a pantomime. "The same remark applies to the same class of the human animal. Ask the Government of the day if it isn't so."

But Mrs. Verulam had no intention of permitting her hero to be involved in a commonplace political discussion.

"Oh, I feel sure that even a sheep is deeply, deeply interesting, if properly studied," she said.

"Aye," said Mr. Bush.

"It's what we bring to a thing, isn't it?" she added, greatly encouraged.

"What would you bring to a sheep?" said Miss Bindler.