LORD HOLME seldom went to parties and never to private views. He thought such things “all damned rot.” Few functions connected with the arts appealed to his frankly Philistine spirit, which rejoiced in celebrations linked with the glories of the body; boxing and wrestling matches, acrobatic performances, weight-lifting exhibitions, and so forth. He regretted that bear-baiting and cock-fighting were no longer legal in England, and had, on two occasions, travelled from London to South America solely in order to witness prize fights.

As he so seldom put in an appearance at smart gatherings he had not yet encountered Miss Schley, nor had he heard a whisper of her much-talked-of resemblance to his wife. Her name was known to him as that of a woman whom one or two of his “pals” began to call a “deuced pretty girl” but his interest in her was not greatly awakened. The number of deuced pretty girls that had been in his life, and in the lives of his pals, was legion. They came and went like feathers dancing on the wind. The mere report of them, therefore, casual and drifting, could not excite his permanent attention, or fix their names and the record of their charms in his somewhat treacherous memory. Lady Holme had not once mentioned the American to him. She was a woman who knew how to be silent, and sometimes she was silent by instinct without saying to herself why.

Lord Holme never appeared on her Wednesdays; and, indeed, those days were a rather uncertain factor among the London joys. If Lady Holme was to be found in her house at all, she was usually to be found on a Wednesday afternoon. She herself considered that she was at home on Wednesdays, but this idea of hers was often a mere delusion, especially when the season had fully set in. There were a thousand things to be done. She frequently forgot what the day of the week was. Unluckily she forgot it on the Wednesday succeeding her invitation to Miss Schley. The American duly turned up in Cadogan Square and was informed that Lady Holme was not to be seen. She left her card and drove away in her coupe with a decidedly stony expression upon her white face.

That day it chanced that Lord Holme came in just before his wife and carelessly glanced over the cards which had been left during the afternoon. He was struck by the name of Pimpernel. It tickled his fancy somehow. As he looked at it he grinned. He looked at it again and vaguely recalled some shreds of the club gossip about Miss Schley’s attractions. When Lady Holme walked quietly into her drawing-room two or three minutes later he met her with Miss Schley’s card in his hand.

“What have you got there, Fritz?” she said.

He gave her the card.

“You never told me you’d run up against her,” he remarked.

Lady Holme looked at the card and then, quickly, at her husband.

“Why—do you know Miss Schley?” she asked.

“Not I.”

“Well then?”

“Fellows say she’s deuced takin’. That’s all. And she’s got a fetchin’ name—eh? Pimpernel.”

He repeated it twice and began to grin once more, and to bend and straighten his legs in the way which sometimes irritated his wife. Lady Holme was again looking at the card.

“Surely it isn’t Wednesday?” she said.

“Yes, it is. What did you think it was?”

“Tuesday—Monday—I don’t know.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

“Whom? Miss Schley? At the Carlton. A lunch of Amalia Wolfstein’s.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Yes.”

There was no hesitation before the reply.

“What colour?

“Oh!—not Albino.”

Lord Holme stared.

“What d’you mean by that, girlie?”

“That Miss Schley is remarkably fair—fairer than I am.”

“Is she as pretty as you?

“You can find out for yourself. I’m going to ask her to something—presently.”

In the last word, in the pause that preceded it, there was the creeping sound of the reluctance Lady Holme felt in allowing Miss Schley to draw any closer to her life. Lord Holme did not notice it. He only said:

“Right you are. Pimpernel—I should like to have a squint at her.”

“Very well. You shall.”

“Pimpernel,” repeated Lord Holme, in a loud bass voice, as he lounged out of the room, grinning. The name tickled his fancy immensely. That was evident.

Lady Holme fully intended to ask Miss Schley to the “something” already mentioned immediately. But somehow several days slipped by and it was difficult to find an unoccupied hour. The Holme cards had, of course, duly gone to the Carlton, but there the matter had ended, so far as Lady Holme was concerned. Miss Schley, however, was not so heedless as the woman she resembled. She began to return with some assiduity to the practice of the talent of the old Philadelphia days. In those days she used to do a “turn” in the course of which she imitated some of the popular public favourites of the States, and for each of her imitations she made up to resemble the person mimicked. She now concentrated this talent upon Lady Holme, but naturally the methods she employed in Society were far more subtle than those she had formerly used upon the stage. They were scarcely less effective. She slightly changed her fashion of doing her hair, puffing it out less at the sides, wearing it a little higher at the back. The change accentuated her physical resemblance to Lady Holme. She happened to get the name of the dressmaker who made most of the latter’s gowns, and happened to give her an order that was executed with remarkable rapidity. But all this was only the foundation upon which she based, as it were, the structure of her delicate revenge.

That consisted in a really admirable hint—it could not be called more—of Lady Holme’s characteristic mannerisms.

Lady Holme was not an affected woman, but, like all women of the world who are greatly admired and much talked about, she had certain little ways of looking, moving, speaking, being quiet, certain little habits of laughter, of gravity, that were her own property. Perhaps originally natural to her, they had become slightly accentuated as time went on, and many tongues and eyes admired them. That which had been unconscious had become conscious. The faraway look came a little more abruptly, went a little more reluctantly; than it had in the young girl’s days. The wistful smile lingered more often on the lips of the twenties than on the lips of the teens. Few noticed any change, perhaps, but there had been a slight change, and it made things easier for Miss Schley.

Her eye was observant although it was generally cast down. Society began to smile secretly at her talented exercises. Only a select few, like Mrs. Wolfstein, knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it, but the many were entertained, as children are, without analysing the cause of their amusement.

Two people, however, were indignant—Robin Pierce and Rupert Carey.

Robin Pierce, who had an instinct that was almost feminine in its subtlety, raged internally, and Rupert Carey, who, naturally acute, was always specially shrewd when his heart was in the game, openly showed his distaste for Miss Schley, and went about predicting her complete failure to capture the London public as an actress.

“She’s done it as a woman,” someone replied to him.

“Not the public, only the smart fools,” returned Carey.

“The smart fools have more influence on the public every day.”

Carey only snorted. He was in one of his evil moods that afternoon. He left the club in which the conversation had taken place, and, casting about for something to do, some momentary solace for his irritation and ennui, he bethought him of Sir Donald Ulford’s invitation and resolved to make a call at the Albany. Sir Donald would be out, of course, but anyhow he would chance it and shoot a card.

Sir Donald’s servant said he was in. Carey was glad. Here was an hour filled up.

With his usual hasty, decisive step he followed the man through a dark and Oriental-looking vestibule into a library, where Sir Donald was sitting at a bureau of teakwood, slowly writing upon a large, oblong sheet of foolscap with a very pointed pen.

He got up, looking rather startled, and held out his hand.

“I am glad to see you. I hoped you would come.”

“I’m disturbing a new poem,” said Carey.

Sir Donald’s faded face acknowledged it.

“Sorry. I’ll go.”

“No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down.”

Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room of books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite Persian carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague and elaborate designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a strange perfume in a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.

“I light it with wax candles,” said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.

“It’s a good room to think in, or to be sad in.”

He struck a match on his boot.

“You like to shut out London,” he continued.

“Yes. Yet I live in it.”

“And hate it. So do I. London’s like a black-browed brute that gets an unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man. Yet one can’t get away from it.”

“It holds interesting minds and interesting faces.”

“Didn’t Persia?”

“Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands.”

“You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?”

“No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers within me.”

He spoke with a sort of wistful whimsicality. Carey stared hard at him.

“A Campo Santo’s a place for the dead.”

“Why not for the dying? Don’t they need holy ground as much?”

“And where’s this holy ground of yours?”

Sir Donald got up from his chair, went over to the bureau, opened a drawer, and took out of it a large photograph rolled round a piece of wood, which he handed to Carey, who swiftly spread it out on his knees.

“That is it.”

“I say, Sir Donald, d’you mind my asking for a whisky-and-soda?”

“I beg your pardon.”

He hastily touched a bell and ordered it. Meanwhile Carey examined the photograph.

“What do you think of it?” Sir Donald asked.

“Well—Italy obviously.”

“Yes, and a conventional part of Italy.”

“Maggiore?”

“No, Como.”

“The playground of the honeymoon couple.”

“Not where my Campo Santo is. They go to Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Villa D’Este sometimes.”

“I see the fascination. But it looks haunted. You’ve bought it?”

“Yes. The matter was arranged to-day.”

The photograph showed a large, long house, or rather two houses divided by a piazza with slender columns. In the foreground was water. Through the arches of the piazza water was also visible, a cascade falling in the black cleft of a mountain gorge dark with the night of cypresses. To the right of the house, rising from the lake, was a tall old wall overgrown with masses of creeping plants and climbing roses. Over it more cypresses looked, and at the base of it, near the house, were a flight of worn steps disappearing into the lake, and an arched doorway with an elaborately-wrought iron grille. Beneath the photograph was written, “Casa Felice.”

“Casa Felice, h’m!” said Carey, with his eyes on the photograph.

“You think the name inappropriate?”

“Who knows? One can be wretched among sunbeams. One might be gay among cypresses. And Casa Felice belongs to you?”

“From to-day.”

“Old—of course?”

“Yes. There is a romance connected with the house.”

“What is it?”

“Long ago two guilty lovers deserted their respective mates and the brilliant world they had figured in, and fled there together.”

“And quarrelled and were generally wretched there for how many months?”

“For eight years.”

“The devil! Fidelity gone mad!”

“It is said that during those years the mistress never left the garden, except to plunge into the lake on moonlight nights and swim through the silver with her lover.”

Carey was silent. He did not take his eyes from the photograph, which seemed to fascinate him. When the servant came in with the whisky-and-soda he started.

“Not a place to be alone in,” he said.

He drank, and stared again at the photograph.

“There’s something about the place that holds one even in a photograph,” he added.

“One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It has been a hermitage ever since.”

“Ah!”

“An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me.”

“Well, I should like to see it in the flesh—or the bricks and mortar. But it’s not a place to be alone in,” repeated Carey. “It wants a woman if ever a house did.”

“What sort of woman?”

Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking with his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.

“A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that are cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can sing them into the islands of the sirens.”

“Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?”

“Don’t you know it?”

He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.

“I can only think of one who at all answers to your description.”

“The one of whom I was thinking.”

“Lady Holme?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t you think she would be dreadfully bored in Casa Felice?”

“Horribly, horribly. Unless—”

“Unless?”

“Who knows what? But there’s very often an unless hanging about, like a man at a street corner, that—” He broke off, then added abruptly, “Invite me to Casa Felice some day.”

“I do.”

“When will you be going there?”

“As soon as the London season is over. Some time in August. Will you come then?”

“The house is ready for you?”

“It will be. The necessary repairs will be begun now. I have bought it furnished.”

“The lovers’ furniture?”

“Yes. I shall add a number of my own things, picked up on my wanderings.”

“I’ll come in August if you’ll have me. But I’ll give you the season to think whether you’ll have me or whether you won’t. I’m a horrible bore in a house—the lazy man who does nothing and knows a lot. Casa Felice—Casa Felice. You won’t alter the name?”

“Would you advise me to?”

“I don’t know. To keep it is to tempt the wrath of the gods, but I should keep it.”

He poured out another whisky-and-soda and suddenly began to curse Miss Schley.

Sir Donald had spoken to her after Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch.

“She’s imitating Lady Holme,” said Carey.

“I cannot see the likeness,” Sir Donald said. “Miss Schley seems to me uninteresting and common.”

“She is.”

“And Lady Holme’s personality is, on the contrary; interesting and uncommon.”

“Of course. Pimpernel Schley would be an outrage in that Campo Santo of yours. And yet there is a likeness, and she’s accentuating it every day she lives.”

“Why?”

“Ask the women why they do the cursed things they do do.”

“You are a woman-hater?”

“Not I. Didn’t I say just now that Casa Felice wanted a woman? But the devil generally dwells where the angel dwells—cloud and moon together. Now you want to get on with that poem.”

Half London was smiling gently at the resemblance between Lady Holme and Miss Schley before the former made up her mind to ask the latter to “something.” And when, moved to action by certain evidences of the Philadelphia talent which could not be misunderstood, she did make up her mind, she resolved that the “something” should be very large and by no means very intimate. Safety wanders in crowds.

She sent out cards for a reception, one of those affairs that begin about eleven, are tremendous at half past, look thin at twelve, and have faded away long before the clock strikes one.

Lord Holme hated them. On several occasions he had been known to throw etiquette to the winds and not to turn up when his wife was giving them. He always made what he considered to be a good excuse. Generally he had “gone into the country to look at a horse.” As Lady Holme sent out her cards, and saw her secretary writing the words, “Miss Pimpernel Schley,” on an envelope which contained one, she asked herself whether her husband would be likely to play her false this time.

“Shall you be here on the twelfth?” she asked him casually.

“Why? What’s up on the twelfth?”

“I’m going to have one of those things you hate—before the Arkell House ball. I chose that night so that everyone should run away early! You won’t be obliged to look at a horse in the country that particular day?”

She spoke laughingly, as if she wanted him to say no, but would not be very angry if he didn’t. Lord Holme tugged his moustache and looked very serious indeed.

“Another!” he ejaculated. “We’re always havin’ ‘em. Any music?”

“No, no, nothing. There are endless dinners that night, and Mrs. Crutchby’s concert with Calve, and the ball. People will only run in and say something silly and run out again.”

“Who’s comin’?”

“Everybody. All the tiresome dears that have had their cards left.”

Lord Holme stared at his varnished boots and looked rather like a puzzled boy at a viva voce examination.

“The worst of it is, I can’t be in the country lookin’ at a horse that night,” he said with depression.

“Why not?”

She hastily added:

“But why should you? You ought to be here.”

“I’d rather be lookin’ at a horse. But I’m booked for the dinner to Rowley at the Nation Club that night. I might say the speeches were too long and I couldn’t get away. Eh?”

He looked at her for support.

“You really ought to be here, Fritz,” she answered.

It ended there. Lady Holme knew her husband pretty well. She fancied that the speeches at the dinner given to Sir Jacob Rowley, ex-Governor of some place she knew nothing about, would turn out to be very lengthy indeed—speeches to keep a man far from his home till after midnight.

On the evening of the twelfth Lord Holme had not arrived when the first of his wife’s guests came slowly up the stairs, and Lady Holme began gently to make his excuses to all the tiresome dears who had had their cards left at forty-two Cadogan Square. There were a great many tiresome dears. The stream flowed steadily, and towards half-past eleven resembled a flood-tide.

Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mr. Bry, Sally Perceval had one by one appeared, and Robin Pierce’s dark head was visible mounting slowly amid a throng of other heads of all shapes, sizes and tints.

Lady Holme was looking particularly well. She was dressed in black. Of course black suits everybody. It suited her even better than most people, and her gown was a triumph. She was going on to the Arkell House ball, and wore the Holme diamonds, which were superb, and which she had recently had reset. She was in perfect health, and felt unusually young and unusually defiant. As she stood at the top of the staircase, smiling, shaking hands with people, and watching Robin Pierce coming slowly nearer, she wondered a little at certain secret uneasinesses—they could scarcely be called tremors—which had recently oppressed her. How absurd of her to have been troubled, even lightly, by the impertinent proceedings of an American actress, a nobody from the States, without position, without distinction, without even a husband. How could it matter to her what such a little person—she always called Pimpernel Schley a little person in her thoughts—did or did not do? As Robin came towards her she almost—but not quite—wished that the speeches at the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley had not been so long as they evidently had been, and that her husband were standing beside her, looking enormous and enormously bored.

“What a crowd!”

“Yes. We can’t talk now. Are you going to Arkell House?”

Robin nodded.

“Take me in to supper there.”

“May I? Thank you. I’m going with Rupert Carey.”

“Really!”

At this moment Lady Holme’s eyes and manner wandered. She had just caught a glimpse of Mrs. Wolfstein, a mass of jewels, and of Pimpernel Schley at the foot of the staircase, had just noticed that the latter happened to be dressed in black.

“Bye-bye!” she added.

Robin Pierce walked on into the drawing-rooms looking rather preoccupied.

Everybody came slowly up the stairs. It was impossible to do anything else. But it seemed to Lady Holme that Miss Schley walked far more slowly than the rest of the tiresome dears, with a deliberation that had a touch of insolence in it. Her straw-coloured hair was done exactly like Lady Holme’s, but she wore no diamonds in it. Indeed, she had on no jewels. And this absence of jewels, and her black gown, made her skin look almost startlingly white, if possible whiter than Lady Holme’s. She smiled quietly as she mounted the stairs, as if she were wrapt in a pleasant, innocent dream which no one knew anything about.

Amalia Wolfstein was certainly a splendid—a too splendid—foil to her. The Jewess was dressed in the most vivid orange colour, and was very much made up. Her large eyebrows were heavily darkened. Her lips were scarlet. Her eyes, which moved incessantly, had a lustre which suggested oil with a strong light shining on it. “Henry” followed in her wake, looking intensely nervous, and unnaturally alive and observant, as if he were searching in the crowd for a bit of gold that someone had accidentally dropped. When anyone spoke to him he replied with extreme vivacity but in the fewest possible words. He held his spare figure slightly sideways as he walked, and his bald head glistened under the electric lamps. Behind them, in the distance, was visible the yellow and sunken face of Sir Donald Ulford.

When Miss Schley gained the top of the staircase Lady Holme saw that their gowns were almost exactly alike. Hers was sewn with diamonds, but otherwise there was scarcely any difference. And she suddenly felt as if the difference made by the jewels was not altogether in her favour, as if she were one of those women who look their best when they are not wearing any ornaments. Possibly Mrs. Wolfstein made all jewellery seem vulgar for the moment. She looked like an exceedingly smart jeweller’s shop rather too brilliantly illuminated; “as if she were for sale,” as an old and valued friend of hers aptly murmured into the ear of someone who had known her ever since she began to give good dinners.

“Here we are! I’m chaperoning Pimpernel. But her mother arrives to-morrow,” began Mrs. Wolfstein, with her strongest accent, while Miss Schley put out a limp hand to meet Lady Holme’s and very slightly accentuated her smile.

“Your mother? I shall be delighted to meet her. I hope you’ll bring her one day,” said Lady Holme; thinking more emphatically than ever that for a woman with a complexion as perfect as hers it was a mistake to wear many jewels.

“I’ll be most pleased, but mother don’t go around much,” replied Miss Schley.

“Does she know London?”

“She does not. She spends most of her time sitting around in Susanville, but she’s bound to look after me in this great city.”

Mrs. Wolfstein was by this time in violent conversation with a pale young man, who always looked as if he were on the point of fainting, but who went literally everywhere. Miss Schley glanced up into Lady Holme’s eyes.

“I hoped to make the acquaintance of Lord Holme to-night,” she murmured. “Folks tell me he’s a most beautiful man. Isn’t he anywhere around?”

She looked away into vacancy, ardently. Lady Holme felt a slight tingling sensation in her cool skin. For a moment it seemed to her as if she watched herself in caricature, distorted perhaps by a mirror with a slight flaw in it.

“My husband was obliged to dine out to-night; unfortunately. I hope he’ll be here in a moment, but he may be kept, as there are to be some dreadful speeches afterwards. I can’t think why elderly men always want to get up and talk nonsense about the Royal family after a heavy dinner. It’s so bad for the digestion and the—ah, Sir Donald! Sweet of you to turn up. Your boy’s been so unkind. I asked him to call, or he asked to call, and he’s never been near me.”

Miss Schley drifted away and was swallowed by the crowd. Sir Donald had arrived at the top of the stairs.

“Leo’s been away in Scotland ever since he had the pleasure of meeting you. He only came back to-night.”

“Then I’m not quite so hurt. He’s always running about, I suppose, to kill things, like my husband.”

“He does manage a good deal in that way. If you are going to the Arkell House ball you’ll meet him there. He and his wife are both—”

“How did do! Oh, Charley, I never expected to see you. I thought it wasn’t the thing for the 2nd to turn up at little hay parties like this. Kitty Barringlave is in the far room, dreadfully bored. Go and cheer her up. Tell her what’ll win the Cup. She’s pale and peaky with ignorance about Ascot this year. Both going to Arkell House, Sir Donald, did you say? Bring your son to me, won’t you? But of course you’re a wise man trotting off to bed.”

“No. The Duke is a very old friend of mine, and so—”

“Perfect. We’ll meet then. They say it’s really locomotor ataxia, poor fellow I but—ah, there’s Fritz!”

Sir Donald looked at her with a sudden inquiring shrewdness, that lit up his faded eyes and made them for a moment almost young. He had caught a sound of vexation in her voice, which reminded him oddly of the sound in her singing voice when Miss Filberte was making a fiasco of the accompaniment. Lord Holme was visible and audible in the hall. His immense form towered above his guests, and his tremendous bass voice dominated the hum of conversation round him. Lady Holme could see from where she stood that he was in a jovial and audacious mood. The dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley had evidently been well cooked and gay. Fritz had the satisfied and rather larky air of a man who has been having one good time and intends to have another. She glanced into the drawing-rooms. They were crammed. She saw in the distance Lady Cardington talking to Sir Donald Ulford. Both of them looked rather pathetic. Mrs. Wolfstein was not far off, standing in the midst of a group and holding forth with almost passionate vivacity and self-possession. Her husband was gliding sideways through the crowd with his peculiarly furtive and watchful air, which always suggested the old nursery game, “Here I am on Tom Tiddler’s ground, picking up gold and silver.” Lady Manby was laughing in a corner with an archdeacon who looked like a guardsman got up in fancy dress. Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed in his left eye, came towards the staircase, moving delicately like Agag, and occasionally dropping a cold or sarcastic word to an acquaintance. He reached Lady Holme when Lord Holme was half-way up the stairs, and at once saw him.

“A giant refreshed with wine,” he observed, dropping his eyeglass.

It was such a perfect description of Lord Holme in his present condition that two or three people who were standing with Lady Holme smiled, looking down the staircase. Lady Holme did not smile. She continued chattering, but her face wore a discontented expression. Mr. Bry noticed it. There were very few things he did not notice, although he claimed to be the most short-sighted man in London.

“Why is your husband so dutiful to-night?” he murmured to his hostess. “I thought he always had to go into the country to look at a gee-gee on these occasions.”

“He had to be in town for the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley. I begged him to come back in—How did do! How did do! Yes, very. Mr. Raleigh, do tell the opera people not to put on Romeo too often this season. Of course Melba’s splendid in it, and all that, but still—”

Mr. Bry fixed his eyeglass again, and began to smile gently like an evil-minded baby. Lord Holme’s brown face was full in view, grinning. His eyes were looking about with unusual vivacity.

“How early you are, Fritz! Good boy. I want you to look after—”

“I say, Vi, why didn’t you tell me?”

Mr. Bry, letting his eyeglass fall, looked abstracted and lent an attentive ear. If he were not playing prompter to social comedies he generally stood in the wings, watching and listening to them with a cold amusement that was seldom devoid of a spice of venom.

“Tell you what, Fritz?”

“That Miss Schley was comin’ to-night. Everyone’s talking about her. I sat next Laycock at dinner and he was ravin’. Told me she was to be here and I didn’t know it. Rather ridiculous, you know. Where is she?”

“Somewhere in the rooms.”

“What’s she like?”

“Oh!—I don’t know. She’s in black. Go and look for her.”

Lord Holme strode on. As he passed Mr. Bry he said:

“I say, Bry, d’you know Miss Pimpernel Schley?”

“Naturally.”

“Come with me, there’s a good chap, and—what’s she like?”

As they went on into the drawing-rooms Mr. Bry dropped out:

“Some people say she’s like Lady Holme.”

“Like Vi! Is she? Laycock’s been simply ravin’—simply ravin’—and Laycock’s not a feller to—where is she?

“We shall come to her. So there was no gee-gee to look at in the country to-night?”

Lord Holme burst into a roar of laughter.

“There’s the vestal tending her lamp,” said Mr. Bry a moment later.

“The what up to what?”

“Miss Pimpernel Schley keeping the fire of adoration carefully alight.”

“Where?”

“There.”

“Oh, I see! Jove, what a skin, though! Eh! Isn’t it? She is deuced like Vi at a distance. Vi looks up just like that when she’s singin’. Doesn’t she, though? Eh?”

He went on towards her.

Mr. Bry followed him, murmuring.

“The giant refreshed with wine. No gee-gee to-night. No gee-gee.”