Christian, professing to himself momentarily that the chance to get away from his guests was at hand, discovered that his escape, all the same, was no easy matter.

Kathleen had disappeared somewhere, and without her he seemed curiously helpless. He did not as yet know the house well enough to be sure about its exits. The result of one furtive attempt at flight was to find himself in the midst of a group of county people, who fell back courteously at his approach and, as if by design, let him become involved in a quite meaningless conversation with a purple-faced, bull-necked old gentleman whose name he could not remember. This person talked at tremendous length, producing his words in gurgling spasms; his voice was so husky and his manner so disconcerting—not to mention the peculiarities of the local dialect in which he spoke—that Christian could make literally nothing of his remarks. He maintained a vapid listener’s-smile, the while his eyes roamed despondently about the room, and what he could see of the next apartment, in search of some relief. If he could hit upon Dicky Westland—or even Edward or Augustine!

It became apparent to him, at last, that his interlocutor was discoursing on the subject of dogs. Of course—it would be about the Caermere hounds. On the grave faces of those about him, who stood near enough to hear the sounds of this mysterious monologue, he read signs that they considered themselves a party to it. It was on their behalf as well as his own that the old gentleman was haranguing him—and he swiftly perceived the necessity of paying better attention.

“The hounds—yes,” he said, after a little. “I have been making inquiries about them. I am advised that they cannot be kept up properly for less than four thousand five hundred a year.”

“Up to Lord Porlock’s death, we had something like twenty-four hundred pounds from the Castle, and we made a whip-round among ourselves,” the other replied, “for the rest. With corn what it is, and rents what they are, we’re all so poor now that it’ll be harder than ever to get subscriptions, but we’ll try to do our share if the Castle’ll meet us half-way.”

Christian felt that he liked being referred to as “the Castle.” Moreover, an idea suddenly took shape in his mind. “My uncle, Lord Porlock, was the Master,” he said. “And before him my grandfather, I believe. But what has been done since Lord Porlock’s death—about a new Master, I mean?”

Out of the complicated response made to this question he gathered vaguely that nothing had been done—that nothing could have been done.

“My cousin, Captain Torr, is a hunting man, I think.” He threw out the question with some diffidence, and was vastly relieved to see the faces brighten about him.

“None better, by God!” affirmed the old gentleman, with vehemence, and there followed a glowing and spluttering eulogium of Edward’s sportsmanlike qualities and achievements, in the middle of which Christian recalled that the speaker was Sir George Dence.

“I like the Mastership to continue in the family, Sir George,” he replied, suavely proud of the decision he had leaped to. “I think I shall suggest to you that Captain Edward take the hounds, and that, for a time at least, you allow the Castle to be at the entire expense. At all events, you have my annual subscription of five thousand pounds to begin upon.”

He made a dignified half-bow in the silence which ensued, and boldly moved away. The murmur of amazed admiration which rose behind him was music in his ears.

Visions of possible escape rose for the moment before him. He walked with an air of resolution through the next room, trying to remember whither the corridor outside led—but at the doorway he stopped face to face with Lord Lingfield.

“Ah,” said his cousin, amiably, “I did not know if I should see you again. I thought perhaps that you had gone to lie down. Funerals take it out of one so, don’t they? My father is quite seedy since lunch, and poor Lady Cressage has the most wretched headache! I think myself she’d do better not to travel while it lasts, but she’s anxious to get away, and so we’re all off by the evening train.”

“Oh, I didn’t dream of your hurrying off like this,” exclaimed Christian, sincerely enough. “But if you are set upon it—come, let’s find your father. It will seem as if I had neglected him.”

“He’s in his room,” explained Lord Lingfield, as they moved away together, “getting into some heavier clothes. The evenings are chilly here in the hills, and we’re to start almost immediately, and take the long drive round through the forest. Lady Cressage has talked so much of it, and we’ve never seen it, you know.”

“But this is all too bad!” urged Christian. “You rush away before I have had time to have a word with any of you. There is no urgent reason for such haste, is there now, really?”

“Lady Cressage seems anxious to go,” answered the other, with a kind of significance in his solemn voice. “And of course—since she came with us——”

Christian stole a quick glance at his kinsman, and as swiftly looked away. “If she prefers it—of course,” he commented with brevity.

“Do you think she is very strong?” asked Lord Lingfield. “I have a kind of fear, sometimes, that her health is not altogether robust. She seemed very pale to-day.” There was a note of obvious solicitude in his voice.

“She has a headache,” Christian reminded him.

“Yes, that would account for it, wouldn’t it?” The young man was visibly relieved by this reflection. “They may say what they like,” he went on, “she is the most beautiful woman in London to-day, just as she was when she was married. Let me see—I am not sure that I ever knew her precise age. Do you happen to know?”

“She is four-and-twenty.”

“Not more! I should have said six, or at least five. Hm-m! Four-and-twenty!” The reiteration, for some reason, seemed to afford him pleasure. “I am nearly thirty myself,” he added meditatively, “and I’m practically sure of being in the next Government. Shall you go in much for politics, do you think? It wouldn’t be of any great use to you, except the Garter, perhaps, and it’s so fearfully slow waiting for that. My father had the promise of it as long ago as Lord John Russell’s time, and it hasn’t come off yet. But then that Home Rule business was so unfortunate—it sent us all over to the Tory side, where there were already more people waiting for things than there were things to go round. If I were you, I would keep very quiet for a year or two—not committing myself openly to either side. I can’t help thinking there will be a break-up. It’s a fearful bore to have only twenty or thirty people on one side and five hundred on the other. They won’t stand it much longer. It doesn’t make a fair distribution of things. Of course, I’m a Unionist, but if I were in your shoes, I’d think it over very carefully. The Liberals haven’t got a single Duke—and mind you, though people don’t seem to notice it, it is a fact that a party practically never succeeds itself. The Liberals are bound to come in, sooner or later—and then, if you were their only Duke, why, you’d get your Garter shot at you out of a gun—so to speak. Of course, I mustn’t be mentioned as saying this—but you think it over! And it needn’t matter in the least—our being in different parties.. We can help each other quite as well—indeed, sometimes I’m tempted to think even better. Of course, I dare say there won’t be much that I can do for you—for the next two or three years, at least—except in the way of advice, and tips, and that sort of thing—but there may be a number of matters that you can help me in.”

Christian nodded wearily—with a nervous thought upon the time being wasted. “I am not likely to forget your kindness—or our family ties,” he said, consciously evasive.

“You never saw Cressage, of course; awful beast!” remarked the other, with an irrelevancy which still struck the listener as having a certain method in it. “It makes a man furious to think what she must have suffered with him. And a mere child, too, when she was married. Only four-and-twenty now! These early marriages are a great mistake. Of course, when a man gets to be nearly thirty, and there is a family and property and so on to be handed along, why, then marriage becomes a duty. That has always been my view. And I try invariably to do my duty, as I see it. I think a man ought to, you know.”

Christian sighed, and restrained an impulse to look at his watch. They had sauntered forward into the central hallway; through the open door could be seen a carriage and pair drawn up before the steps. A rustle on the stairs behind him caught his ear, and turning, Christian beheld Lady Cressage descending toward him, with Lord Chobham looming, stately and severe, in the shadows above her.

Christian moved impulsively to her. “It was the greatest surprise to me—and disappointment, too—to hear that you were going like this,” he declared, with outstretched hand.

She smiled feebly, and regarded him with a pensive consideration. Her heavy mourning of an earlier hour had been exchanged for a black garb less ostentatiously funereal, yet including the conventional widow’s-fall, which he had not seen her wear before. The thought that here at Caermere, last autumn, she had not even worn a widow’s-cap, rose in his mind. It carried with it a sense of remissness, of contumacy as against the great family which had endowed her with one of its names. But at least now she exhibited a consciousness that her husband was less than a year dead. And her pallid face was very beautiful in its frame of black—a delicately strong face, meditative, reserved, holding sadness in a proud restraint. “I am not very well,” she said to him, in tones to reach his ear alone. “The crowd here depressed me. I could not bring myself to appear at luncheon. It seems better that I should go away.”

“But it is such a fatiguing journey—for one who does not feel wholly up to it!” he urged upon her. “All these strangers will be going—I think some of them have gone already. I don’t know what their rule is here about stopping after luncheon—but surely they must clear out very soon. Then we shall be quite by ourselves—so that if that is your only reason for going—why, I can’t admit that it is a reason at all.”

He paused, and strove to cover with a halting smile his sudden perception that they were not talking with candor to each other. There were things in her mind, things in his mind, which bore no relation to the words they uttered. She was looking at him musingly—and he felt that he could read in her glance, or perhaps gather from what there was not in her glance, that she would not go if he begged her with sufficient earnestness to remain. Nay, the conviction flashed vividly uppermost in his thoughts that even a tolerable simulation of this earnestness would be enough. It was as if a game were being played, in which he was not quite the master of his moves. In this mere instant of time, while they had stood facing each other, he had been able to reproduce the whole panorama of his contact with this beautiful woman. From that first memorable day when she had come into his wondering, distraught vision of the new life before him, to that other day but a week ago when he had stood trembling with passionate emotions in her presence, his mental pictures of her rose connectedly about him. They exerted a pressure upon his will. They left him no free agency in the matter. By all the chivalric, tenderly compassionate memories they evoked, he must bid her to remain.

“I am very sorry that you feel you must go,” was what he heard himself say instead.

“Good-bye,” she answered simply, and gave him her gloved hand with an impassive face. “Lord Chobham and Lord Lingfield are good enough to see me back to London again. We are driving round through the forest. Our people are to join us at the station with the luggage. Goodbye.”

He accompanied the party out to the carriage door, despite some formal doubts about its being the proper thing to do. Both father and son made remarks to him, to which he seemed to himself to be making suitable answers, but what they were about he never knew. The tragedy of Edith’s final departure from Caermere—she who had been the hostess here when he came; she who was to have worn the coronet on her lovely brow as the mistress of it all—seized upon his mind and harrowed it. A vehement self-reproach that his thoughts should have done her even momentary injustice stung him, as he beheld her seated in the carriage. She smiled at him—that wistful, subdued smile of the headache—and then, as the horses moved, his eyes were resting upon another smile instead—the beaming of fatuous content upon the countenance of Lord Lingfield, who sat facing her.

Christian, regarding this second cousin of his as the carriage receded from view, suddenly breathed a long sigh of relief.

All at once remembering many things, he wheeled with the impulse to run up the steps. Upon reflection, he ascended them sedately instead, and gave orders in the hall that Mr. Westland should be sent to him forthwith. Two or more groups of departing guests came upon him, while he stood irresolutely here, and he bade them farewell with formal gravity. The two parsons whom he had seen at the church were among them—attired now in black garments with curiously ugly little round, flat hats—and he noted with interest that their smirking deference now displeased him less than it had done in the morning. He perceived that his lungs were becoming accustomed to the atmosphere of adulation, and smiled tolerantly at himself. How long would it be, he wondered with idle amusement, before it would stifle him to breathe any other air?

Augustine had sauntered out from some unknown quarter into the hall, and Christian beckoned to him. A shapeless kind of suspicion, born of a resemblance now for the first time suggesting itself, had risen in his brain. He took the young man by the arm, and strolled aside with him.

“Am I wrong,” he asked carelessly, “or did I see you at the supper at the Hanover Theater? Let us see—it would be a week ago to-night? I thought so. Why I asked—I was curious to know whom you were with. It was a young man; you were standing together between some scenery as I passed you.”

“Oh!” said Augustine, with visible reassurance. “That was Tom Bailey—Cora’s brother, you know.”

“What sort is he?” Christian pursued, secretly astonished at the inspired accuracy of his intuition.

“Well”—replied the other, hesitatingly—“it’s rather hard to say. He got sent down from Cambridge for something or other, and his governor got the needle over it, and put him on an allowance of a pound a week, or something like that, and so what could he do? It’s jolly hard on a young fellow round town to have less money than anybody else. He’s bound to get talked about, if he only owes half-a-crown to some outsider or other, and that makes other fellows turn shirty. But I think he always pays when he can.”

“You like him, then, do you?”

“Oh, yes—I like Tom well enough,” answered Augustine, dubiously pondering the significance of the interrogatory. “He’d be all right if—if he had a proper chance.” With a sigh, he ventured to add: “He’s like the rest of us—that way.”

At sight of Dicky Westland’s approach. Christian dropped his inquiries abruptly. “All right,” he said, with enigmatic brevity, and turned to his secretary with a meaning gesture. “I want to get away from here—out of the Castle,” he murmured to the newcomer, “without a minute’s delay. I have a—kind of appointment, and I am already late. If you will get our hats, we will walk out together, as if we were discussing some private matter, and then no one will interrupt us.”

This confidence was only partially justified by events. The two made their way unmolested into the open air, and across some long stretches of lawn to the beginning of the series of gardens. It was within Christian’s memory that one reached the orchards and the opening upon the heath by traversing these gardens. But in the second of them, where remarkable masses of tulips in gorgeous effulgence of bloom occupied the very beds in which he believed the dahlias must have been last year, there was some one on the well-remembered path in front of him.

A little child of two or three years, still walking insecurely at least, was being led along the edge of the flower-border by a woman in black whose back was turned.

The infant had caught the notion of bending over the hyacinths, one by one, laboriously to smell their perfume, and the woman indulgently lent herself to the pastime, halting and supporting the little one by the hand.

Christian wondered vaguely what child this could be, before observation told him that the person they were approaching was a lady. He took Dicky’s arm then, and quickened their step. “We will be very much engaged as we pass,” he admonished him. After a few paces, however, the futility of this device made itself apparent. The lady, glancing indifferently over her shoulder at the sound, of their tread, turned on the instant with a little cry of pleasure.

It was Cora who came toward them, now radiant of face and with an extended hand. She dragged the surprised child heedlessly along at her side with the other arm.

“Oh, Duke!” she cried. “I did so long to burst in upon you, wherever you were to be found, and thank you when I heard. It was Sir George Dence who told us. And Eddy, he’s quite off his head with joy! He wanted to look you up, too, but I told him to put off thanking you till to-morrow; between ourselves, I don’t fancy he’ll be seen quite to the best advantage later on to-day. But I know you’ll think none the worse of him for that; and there’s a good bit to be done, he says, in the way of pulling the Hunt together again to work like one man. He’s begun already promoting the right sort of feeling. He’s got Sir George and old General Fawcett and about a dozen more of ’em in the billiard-room, and I told him everything would be all right so long as they didn’t sing. On account of the funeral, you know. And—why, you’ve never seen my oldest unmarried daughter! Look up and say, ‘How-de-do?’ Chrissy. Why, she’s your namesake! Yes, her baptismal name is Christiana or Christina—which is it? We always call her Chrissy. And you haven’t told me what an effective family group I make. You never would have believed that I could be so domestic, now, would you?”

She had gathered the child up into her arms, and under the influence of her jocund mood Christian smiled cheerfully. “You are very wonderful as a mother,” he assured her, and extended a tentative finger toward Chrissy, who, huddled in awkward and twisted discomfort under her mother’s elbow, regarded him with unconcealed repulsion.

“She seems an extremely healthy child,” he remarked, and the words were not so perfunctory as they sounded. The robust, red cheeked heartiness of Chrissy raised musing reflections in his mind. If this infant, with its stout mottled arms and legs, had been a boy, it would be at this moment his heir. No one could ask for a finer child—and she was very closely akin to him. And Cora was her mother—and Cora’s sister!

“Oh, but where are we going to live?” she broke in upon his meditations. “I said to Eddy that I’d lay odds you were thinking of David’s Court for us. You know the kennels used to be there before Porlock’s time.”

“All that we can arrange,” said Christian, shaking off his reverie, and lifting his hat. “Rest easy in your mind about everything.”

She nodded with an expansive geniality which freely included Dicky as well, and then walked away. It slowly occurred to Christian that she had said nothing about her sister’s presence in the neighborhood, although it was impossible to suppose her ignorant, of it. Upon consideration, he decided that her reticence was delicate. He felt that he liked Cora, and then uneasily speculated upon the seeming probability that his liking for her was in excess of her sister’s.

“Westland,” he said, with a new thought in his busy brain, “you know about geography—about where the different British colonies are on the map, and what they are distinguished for. I want to know of a good place, a very long way off, where two young men with a moderate capital might do well, or-at least have the chance to do well.”

“Fellows like that generally go to South Africa, nowadays,” replied Dicky, “though I believe it’s gone off a bit. It’s not as far away as Australia, but it’s livelier, apparently. They don’t seem to come back as much.”

“No; I have a prejudice against that Johannesburg. It is not a good atmosphere, and it is too easy to get into trouble there.”

“There are great reports about British Columbia just now. They’ve found wonderful new gold-fields, and they’re a fearful distance from anywhere. It takes you months to get to them, so I’m told. But it depends so much on what the fellows themselves are like. If I may ask, do I know them?”

“It is Augustine Torr that I have in mind, and a young friend of his—Bailey his name is. By the way, a brother of the lady we just left.”

“I know of him,” commented Dicky sententiously.

“Well, it has occurred to me that these young men, for whom there seems no specially suitable foothold in England, might accomplish something in the colonies. That is the way Greater Britain, as they call it, has been made—by young men who might have done nothing at all worth doing at home. Life is really very difficult and complicated in this crowded island, unless one has exactly the temperament to succeed. But in the colonies it is different. Men who are of no use here may become valuable there. I have heard that there are many instances of this. And these young men, it seems to me that very possibly, if they found themselves on new ground, they might do as others have done and get on. We do not quite know what to do with them here, but we send them out, and they make the Empire.”

“It’s rather rough on the Empire, though, isn’t it?” said Dicky.

Christian frowned and drew himself up a little. “One is my cousin,” he said coldly, “and the other is the brother of—is the brother of my cousin’s wife.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the secretary, as upon a sudden resolution, stopped. “It’s no good my going on,” he said, nervously, but with decision. “I daresay you don’t mean it, but all the same it’s too much for me. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll turn it up and catch the evening-train. I don’t mind going to the station in the brake with the servants and the luggage. It certainly won’t take anybody by surprise.” Christian regarded him with open-eyed astonishment. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, in obvious candor.

Dicky restlessly threw out his hands. “Oh, I can’t stand this Dukeness of yours,” he declared. “You put it on too thick. I know Gus Torr, and I know as much as I want to of Tom Bailey, and I know they’re no good, and you know it, too—although I don’t say they mayn’t get on in the colonies. God knows what won’t get on there! But when I make some perfectly civil and natural remark on the subject, you flame up at me, and blow yourself out like a pouter pigeon, and say they’re—haw-haw!—relations of yours. Well, that be damned, you know! It may do once in a way with outsiders, but it isn’t good enough to live with.”

“Dicky!” said Christian, in a voice of awed appeal. His brown face distorted itself in lines of painful bewilderment as he gazed at his companion. “Have I done that? Is it as bad as that?” He gasped the questions out in a frightened way and tears sprang into his eyes. “Then it is not you who should catch the evening train, but me. I am not fit to be here!” He finished with a groan of bitter dejection and bowed his head.

Westland, as much scared as surprised at the violent result of his protest, moved impetuously to his friend and put a hand on his shoulder. “No-no! No-no,” he said, in a soothing voice. “It’s all right! I said you didn’t mean it, you know. Truly, old man, I knew you didn’t mean it! Upon my word, it’s all right!”

Christian lifted his head, and tried to choke down his agitation. “But you go away from me!” he said in despairing tones. “It is the same as ever! Nothing is changed for me! I do not make friends—much less keep them!”

“But I am your friend! You are keeping me!” Dicky insisted, raising his voice. An odd impulse to laugh aloud struggled confusedly with the concern the other’s visible suffering gave him. “I take it all back. I’m stopping with you, right enough!”

Christian accepted the assurance in a dazed way, and after he had silently shaken the other’s hand, began walking on again, studying the ground with a troubled frown. “I am a weak and dull fool!” he growled at last, in rage at himself. “I have not sense enough to behave properly! It is a mistake that I should he put over anybody else! I make myself ridiculous, like any parvenu.”

“No—that’s all rot,” the other felt it judicious to urge. “You’re perfectly all right, only—only——”

“Only I’m not!” Christian filled in the gap of hesitation with an angry laugh.

Gradually a calmer view of himself pervaded his mind. “It is more difficult than you think, Dicky,” he affirmed, after a pause. “It is not easy at all—at first—to—what shall I say?—to keep feeling your feet under you on the solid ground. The temptation to soar, to think you are lifted up, is upon you every minute. It catches you unawares. Ah! I see one must watch that without ceasing. Oh, I am glad—more glad than I can tell you—that you stopped me. Ah! that was a true friend’s service.”

Dicky chuckled softly: “It’s much nicer, if you can take it that way,” he admitted.

“If I am ever anything but nice to yoo,” Christian began, gravely, and then stopped as if he had bitten his tongue. “Oh, there is patronage again!” he cried with vexation—and then let himself be persuaded to join in the frank laughter that the other set up.

“Oh, we shall hit it off all right,” Dicky assured him as a final word on the subject. “It’s merely a question of time. You’ve got to get accustomed to your new job, and I to mine: that’s all there is of it. We shall learn the whole bag of tricks in a week or so, and be happy ever afterward.”

The joking refrain struck some welcome chord in Christian’s thoughts. He looked up, and noted that they were very near the door leading out from the fruit-garden to the heath beyond the wall. Halting, he smiled into his companion’s face.

“No one will follow me now,” he said with sparkling eyes. “I will let you turn back here, if you don’t mind.”