Le Roy est mort; vive le Roy!

King Edward was mourned a twelvemonth, and in the spring of the following year all sorts and conditions of men gathered to do honour to his successor. Before the first hammer beat on the first Coronation stand, the invasion of London had begun: from Channel to Tweed ran a whisper of social schemings—a daughter's presentation, a ball, a house in town for the Season. Our solid, self-conscious race, never gay for gaiety's sake, reached out and grasped the excuse for innocent dissipation. The last five years had been so charged with political acrimony, the world had worked itself into so great a passion over the Budgets and Second Chambers. Three months respite was a prospect alluring to the straitest Puritan.

My uncle Bertrand had hoped that a year of mourning would tempt his countrymen to regard politics as a serious study rather than a pretext for vulgar abuse. Seldom have I watched the death of a vainer hope, for the world flung off its black clothes and prepared for carnival. Apaches plotted new raids, strange-tongued provincials rubbed shoulders with American tourists, Colonial Prime Ministers jostled you in the streets or appropriated your favorite table at the restaurants.

For a time I sought refuge in the Club—and found it was no refuge. Members were balloting for seats to view the procession or discussing Adolf Erckmann's prospects in the Coronation Honours List. Erckmann himself was very prominent, and the capture of London, which he largely effected in the next three or four years, started with his acquisition of a title. Perhaps he tried to capture the Eclectic Club—I certainly remember being asked to blackball three of his candidates. If so, he failed; the most mediaeval club in the world was strong to resist the most modern social impresario. And this I regard with satisfaction when I consider, in moments of sombre retrospection, how the tone of England has become modernized in the last half generation. Sir John Woburn and the Press Combine modernized journalism; Vandale, Bendix and Trosser modernized the House of Commons, as anyone will agree who recalls the three scandals associated with their names—squalid, financial scandals, lacking the scale and dignity of Central American corruption; and Erckmann modernized London Society. It was a brilliant, gaudy thing when he left it, yet I almost preferred the old state when the loudest voice and longest purse did not necessarily go the furthest.

From time to time I saw something of his conquering march. My mother and sister came over for the Coronation, and we suffered the season patiently. Of course we gave a ball; equally 'of course,' it was at the Ritz, for the Ritz at this time was an article of faith. If a hostess wanted men, she must entertain there; if a man wanted supper, he must secure an invitation by hook or by crook—or else walk in without it.

"Otherwise you get no food," as my barbarian young cousin, Greville Hunter-Oakleigh, confessed to me one night at the Monagasc Minister's ball in Grosvenor Gardens. He had danced dutifully with "all the right people," and was now going on with Violet, Summertown and two brother officers in search of supper. Greville and Violet had been invited; Summertown issued invitations to the others on the principle that hostesses were always glad of a few extra men.

"You're so damned William-and-Maryish," he complained, when I refused to come without a card. "If you won't, you won't, but they're frightfully rich and they'll do you awfully well. So long. We shall be back in a couple of hours."

He hurried away, and I set myself to protect my sister Beryl from Lady Ullswater, who was marking her down as a new-comer and angling for the privilege of chaperoning her. Before our ball took place I had an offer of the whole Brigade from John Ashwell, but we thought it would be amusing to make our own arrangements. A number of people strayed in without being asked, but this was in some sense balanced by our being able to refuse invitations to a host of Erckmann's protÉgÉs.

Erckmann himself—Sir Adolf, as he became—we were compelled to invite out of compliment to Lady Dainton. For some time her husband had been observable at the Eclectic Club, lunching with Erckmann and consuming an amount of champagne and Corona cigars that argued business discussion. There followed an issue of new companies with the name of Sir Roger Dainton, Bart., M.P., on the prospectus; later I met Erckmann at dinner in Rutland Gate; later still the Daintons took a moor. It was one of those rare business associations in which everyone secured what he wanted. I myself, a mere private in a stage army, was invited to join a party for Ober-Ammergau, and, if I declined to witness a Passion Play in Erckmann's company, my refusal was prompted less by social prejudice than by superstitious scruple.

At first I was mildly surprised to find the Daintons so much in public so soon after Sonia's engagement had been broken off; but the longer I lived in London the more people I found skirmishing to get away from other people and on one occasion in Coronation week, I remember seeing Loring, Crabtree, O'Rane and Sonia under the same roof. In practice, however, they kept apart without undue contrivance. Crabtree became engaged at this time to Mrs. Pauncefote, widow of the Staffordshire brewer and a woman some eleven years his senior; he was now in a position to woo the electors of the Brinton Division, and little was seen of him in London. O'Rane, on the rare occasions when I met him hurrying to or from the Continent, diving into the Conservative Central Office or disappearing into the industrial north, maintained an attitude of mystery and would tell me nothing of his movements. He was incessantly restless and as self-absorbed as ever, but the lines of his old, clear-cut scheme of life had lost something of their sharpness. His breach with the past seemed almost complete, marked in black and white—or so I fancied—by a letter I had given him to read twelve months before at the Charing Cross Hotel. At the end of the season he and Sonia met at the Embassy Ball; they bowed and passed on. Then his eyes sought mine as though wondering what were my thoughts. I made some comment on her dress; he made no answering comment at all.

As for Loring, I hardly saw him from the spring of 1911, when he hurried abroad, to the spring of 1914, when he returned. As a matter of form he came back for the Coronation, but did not stay an hour more than was necessary. Summertown, never a veracious chronicler, worked up a picturesque story of the yacht moored by Hungerford Bridge, and its owner changing out of his robes as he drove down the Embankment and dropping his coronet into the river in his haste to get away from England. I have but a confused idea where he went during those three years, and the question is immaterial. The important thing is that he was absent from London at a time when London was almost oppressively full of Sonia Dainton.

She was on the defensive when we first met, as though expecting me to blame her for the broken engagement. When, as was natural, I said nothing, she developed a curious recklessness and gave me to understand that, whosever the fault, she did not care a snap of the fingers for the consequences. It was partly pose, I think, and partly a very modern refusal to allow her feelings to be stirred below the surface, partly also the manner and spirit of her surroundings. I always fancy I saw a change in her from the day when Lady Dainton relaxed her social severity and opened her doors to Erckmann and his cortÈge. With her catchwords, her volubility and over-ready laugh, something of hysteria seemed to have crept into her life. Whatever the entertainment, she was among the first to arrive and the last to go, dancing hard, supping heartily, talking incessantly, laughing gustily and smoking with fine abandon. Hourly new excitement, prostration, forgetfulness—that seemed the formula.

"What happens on Sundays, Sonia?" I once asked her, when we met for supper and a discussion of our day's work.

"I take laudanum," was the answer.

It was true in spirit; it may even have been true in fact. I was often reminded of a chorus girl I once saw in undergraduate days at a Covent Garden Ball, whirling through the night—like Sonia—from one till three, and at four o'clock lying asleep in a box with her cheek on her arm, oblivious and—I hope—happy; in any case too weary to dream what the future might hold. Looking back on the four years of carnival that ended with the war, I seem to find in Sonia the embodiment of the age's spirit.

"You know how that sort of thing ends, I suppose?" I took occasion to ask.

"Oh, don't be heavy, George!" she exclaimed impatiently. "We can only die once."

"To some extent we can postpone the date," I suggested.

"Who wants to? A short life and a merry one. This is a dull show, you know. How do you come to be here?"

"My name was gleaned from an obsolete work of reference," I said, producing a card with 'M.P.' on it. "And you?"

"Oh, I wasn't selected at all. Fatty Webster smuggled me in." She dropped her voice confidentially. "George, this is a deadly secret. Mrs. Marsden, who's responsible for this—this funeral, told mother she wanted to break down the exclusiveness of London Society——"

"Many taunts have been hurled at that indeterminate class," I observed. "No one ever called it exclusive before."

"It's exclusive if you're from Yorkshire, like her, with a perfectly poisonous taste in dress. Well, all the girls come from Highgate Ponds—Lord Summertown told me so——"

"He ought to know," I said.

"And all the men from Turnham Green. You know, where the buses come from. Fatty Webster heard what it was going to be like, so he and Sam and Lord Summertown went off to Fatty's rooms in Albemarle Street; they've changed into corduroys and red handkerchiefs, and they're pulling up Piccadilly in solid chunks with pickaxes. It's the greatest fun in life. I went to see them half an hour ago. They've got lanterns and ropes and things, and they're doing frightful damage. And the best of it is that it's pouring with rain and none of the cars can get to either door."

"As a law-abiding citizen, I think it's my duty to warn the police," I said.

"Oh, you mustn't! You'll get Sam into a frightful row."

"That I don't mind if Webster spends a night in the cells. Sonia, he's a dreadful young man. Where did you find him?"

"He's a friend of Sir Adolf's. He's rather a sport, really, and enormously rich."

"He was richer a week ago."

"You mean before the breach of promise case? I suppose so. Honestly, if Fatty proposed to me, I should slap his face, but if he had the presumption to back out of it—my word!"

"He's too much like the domestic pig," I objected.

"Oh, he's quite harmless and very useful. He cadged me an invitation for the Embassy Ball. Are you going?"

"I've been invited," I said.

There the subject dropped, for I had promised to go with O'Rane and was not sure how he would take the news that Sonia also was to be present. Still in the enigmatic mood, he shrugged his shoulders and informed me that his acceptance had gone forth, and he proposed to abide by it. I raised no further objection as the ball promised to be amusing. It was a limited liability entertainment, floated by a number of diplomatic underlings, and, as some difficulty was experienced in securing invitations, there was an orgy of subterfuge, intrigue and bribery on the part of aspirants. One of the Russian attachÉs confided to me that he could have lunched and dined in four different places every day after the announcement was made in the Press and stayed in six several houses for Goodwood. There was considerable overlapping, and, if some received no invitations, others received many. O'Rane, who had known more Ambassadors before he was five than most men meet in a lifetime, had cards sent him from three Embassies and four Legations. It is perhaps superfluous to mention that of these the Austrian was not one.

If there be any justification for such a ball, it surely lies in a certain brilliancy of stage-management. The Embassy Ball was well stage-managed. As we drove into its neighbourhood, a double line of cars was stretching from end to end of Brook Street, with one tail bending down Park Lane to Hamilton Place and the other forking and losing itself in Hanover Square. The pavements outside Claridge's were thronged with eager, curious spectators, their lean faces white in the blinding glare of strong head-lights. Excited whispers and an occasional half-timid cheer greeted the appearance of figures familiar in politics or on the Turf. It was the night of the Westmoreland House reception, and uniforms, medals and orders flashed in brave rivalry with the aigrettes and blue-white, shimmering diamonds of the women. A warm fragrance of blending perfumes floated through the open portals into the courtyard, and with the slamming of doors, the swish of skirts and the clear high babble of voices came mingling the distant wail of the violins and the dreamy, half-heard cadence of a waltz.

"After the railway strike this is rather refreshing," I said to O'Rane, as we advanced inch by inch towards the doorway where Count Ristori, the doyen of the Corps Diplomatique, was receiving on behalf of his colleagues.

"And instructive," he added.

"Your revolution hasn't come off yet, Raney," I said, in the intervals of catching the eyes of the Daintons and bowing to them.

"Nor my war. Perhaps they'll balance each other and leave us to enjoy—this kind of thing. You know how it ended? Men's demands granted, owners given a free hand to recoup themselves by raising freights. D'you know why it ended?"

"It had gone beyond a joke," I said.

The Daintons had been compelled to cancel a week-end party at Crowley Court owing to the impossibility of assembling their guests.

O'Rane laid his hand confidentially on my shoulder.

"I'm told," he said,—"all my information comes from this Embassy crowd,—I'm told Germany was preparing to strike at France and collar the whole country north of a line to Cherbourg. We couldn't have stood that. But if we'd declared war with the strike on—whew! you couldn't have transported man or gun."

"A pretty story," I commented. "I don't believe it. Do you?"

"Oh, what does it matter what I believe? You think I'm revolution-mad. The threat of war ended the strike, the end of the strike postponed the war. Vive la bagatelle!" He gripped my arm and his voice quickened and rose till our neighbours turned round and smiled in amused surprise. "George, I wonder if it was like this in the last days of the Ancien RÉgime—a year before the Revolution and six before Napoleon. Marie Antoinette and Count Fersen the first couple, the Court following in beautiful brocaded dresses, with patches and powdered hair, and blue and silver and rose-red coats, and lace cuffs and silk stockings and buckled shoes. Such manners! And such corruption of soul! Peaceful, secure, unheeding. And outside the Palace a line of gilt coaches. And running under the horses' heads for a glimpse of the clothes and jewels—the tiers État." He smiled ironically and shrugged his shoulders. "'En effet, ils sont des hommes.' Was it like this?"

"It was like this again ten years after the Revolution and ten days after Waterloo—when corruption ought to have been purged out of the world."

"But will nothing make these people see the tiers État at their door?"

"I saw them myself. What is one to do?"

"Mon dieu!"

"That's no answer, Raney," I said.

"The answer was given you nearly two thousand years ago."

A moment later we were bowing over the hand of Count Ristori. Then the queue behind us pressed forward, and we were separated. Several hours elapsed before we met again, though he was rarely out of my sight. Indeed, I followed his movements rather closely and made a discovery. Sonia gave me a dance, and when it was over we sat and watched the scene from two chairs by an open window. There was a formality and decorum about the ball that evidently rather irked her: and from her tone of somewhat pert disparagement I gathered that she did not know many of the people present.

"David's all over the Ambassadors," she remarked, with her eyes on a corner where he was standing with three or four be-ribboned Secretaries.

"That's old Dracopoli," I told her. "He was in command when Raney's father was wounded. The fat little man with the high cheek-bones used to be Russian Minister of Finance."

"I had no idea he was so famous," she drawled, with easy contempt.

"I'm inclined to think Raney's a bigger man than either of us gave him credit for," I said.

And that was my discovery. It cleared my mind of a patronizing friendliness dating from the time when I was a monitor and he a fag at Melton. I always recognized his mental abilities no less than the endurance which had kept him for a dozen years from starving. But he talked so much like any other brilliant Irish boy, he was so exuberant and unstable, that it was the convention not to take him seriously. That night—and under my eyes—he seemed to be coming into his kingdom. It was almost his first public appearance in England since boyhood, and, as old scandals slipped into oblivion, the friends of his father claimed acquaintance as my uncle had done six years before. There are few men who have before their twenty-sixth birthday made all the money they will ever need, few who have travelled in so many countries of the world and met so many people. That was all that the Claridge ball-room knew, but I had lived in close communion with him for several years and could have written many a supplementary chapter.

"He's clever," Sonia admitted, "but he's frightfully selfish."

"Have you met his partner—a man called Morris?" I asked. "He's the man to discuss Raney's shortcomings with you."

"I don't want to discuss them with anyone. I know. He's absolutely wrapped up in himself and his precious dreams. George, for some years he and I ..."

"I know," I interrupted. "Once when you dined with me at the House, you promised some day to tell me why you didn't end your ridiculous boy-and-girl engagement."

Sonia put her head on one side and pouted.

"To be quite honest," she said, "I was secretly rather afraid of him."

"But he's the gentlest man on earth, and the most courteous."

"If you do what he wants; otherwise—if you wear green when he'd like you to wear brown——!"

"But all this is hardly a reason for refusing to break off the engagement."

"I was afraid of him," she repeated.

I know Sonia well enough to say in five cases out of twenty when she is speaking the truth. This was one.

"Afraid of Raney?" I cried. "Are you afraid of him now?"

"I've not seen him to speak to for years. Until tonight—and then we only bowed——"

"If you want to see him again, you've only to tell him so."

She threw her head up with a rare expression of scorn.

"How kind!" she exclaimed. "But he's far too lifty to know me now, even if I was in the habit——"

"Then I shall never know whether you're still afraid of him," I said. "He'll not come till he's sent for—sent for and told he's wanted——"

"Is this a message?" she demanded.

"A reminder," I answered. "Forgive me, but you have not been discussed by us since he came back from the Continent a year ago. I am recalling something I think he told you over at Lake House before he went to Mexico."

"Oh, the Butterfly Life Sermon? He gave me five years to outgrow it, didn't he? Tell him—No." The first bars of a waltz were starting, and the two ball-rooms began to fill. A corpulent, red young man—I knew him by sight as young Webster—walked sheepishly to our window and stood in front of us. Sonia looked round the crowded room with eager, bright eyes, pulled the straps of her dress higher on to the shoulders and rose to her feet. "I'll leave you to make up the message," she told me; and to her partner, "Come Fatty. Let's take the floor before the mob gets in."

In the still empty room they executed a wonderful stage-dance of dips and runs and eccentric twinings. As O'Rane joined me by the open window, I felt there was no need to give him any message.

"Supper or bed?" I asked him as I glanced at my watch.

"Not bed!" he answered, with a touch of the old exultant joy in existence that I had not seen since his early days at Oxford. "I'm having the time of my life, George. I'm dam' good at this sort of thing. First of all I danced with Amy Loring and didn't tear her dress. Then I found a Conservative Whip——"

"Are you really standing?"

"Don't interrupt! I invited Lady Dainton to have supper twice, and she accepted both times. I asked perfect strangers to dance with me on the ground that I'd met their brothers in Hong-Kong. I cadged cigarettes from other perfect strangers, and I carried out a First Secretary's wife in a fainting condition."

"You take a very frivolous view of life," I observed, as I ordered some poached eggs and beer.

"It's all right. I shan't come here again," he answered.

"But I thought you were enjoying yourself?"

He drummed on the table with his fingers and smiled round the room.

"So I am," he said. "If you'd ever been as poor as a rat, you'd know what it feels like to have money to burn!" His black eyes suddenly shone with anger, and his fingers ceased their idle drumming. "If you'd ever had your birth flung in your teeth——"

"Don't you ever forget anything, Raney?" I asked in his sudden, fierce pause.

"Nothing, old man. Not a line of a book I've ever read nor the letter of a word a man's ever said to me. I—I've been taken on my merits here to-night. I don't want to forget anything. After all, if you forget what it's like to go through one or two circles of Hell, you haven't much pity for the souls that are still suffering there."

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

"Follow my destiny," he answered, with his black eyes gazing into the distance.

"So you told me some years ago when the Daintons gave their first ball at the Empire Hotel."

"And haven't I kept my word? I've been finding the means, and you know the twin obsessions of my mind."

"War and a revolution?"

He nodded, and looked round the supper-room.

"There's a lot worth saving, George; it's the greatest country in the world. But there's a lot to be rooted out. People won't recognize that civilization can never be stationary." He waved his hand rhythmically in time with the music. "Backwards or forwards. Backwards or forwards. And coming here after some years abroad, everything I see makes me think we're sliding backwards."

II

Though O'Rane gave me no more than a couple of veiled hints, he was at this time in train to be adopted as a Conservative candidate. There was a certain irony in the son of the last Lord O'Rane standing in such an interest, but the House of Commons has little use for non-party men, and he was now more closely connected with the National Service and Navy Leagues than with any Liberal organization.

The irony would have been completer if the swift changes of politics had not delayed his election. It was not till the early spring of 1914 that he took his seat, and his place by this time was on the Ministerial side. The volte-face sounds more abrupt than it really was if it be remembered that he never had more than one object in view at a time. Political gossip in the days of the Agadir incident said that part of the Cabinet was ready for war while another part asserted that our warlike preparations were inadequate. From that moment O'Rane's mind was set on seeing the country put into such training that it would not be found wanting if a similar crisis arose in the future.

When he finally went to the electors of Yateley, the focus of public interest had changed. The surface of diplomacy was unruffled; the Tripoli Campaign and the two Balkan wars had dragged to an end without involving any of the Great Powers, and my uncle's confidence rose from strength to strength at the confirmation of his favourite doctrine that modern war was too vast and complex for a first class power to undertake.

On the other hand, the condition of England was a matter for considerable searching of heart. A spirit of unrest and lawlessness, a neurotic state not to be dissociated from the hectic, long-drawn Carnival that continued from month to month and year to year, may be traced from the summer of the Coronation. It is too early to probe the cause or say how far the staggering ostentation of the wealthy fomented the sullen disaffection of the poor. It is as yet impossible to weigh the merits in any one of the hysterical controversies of the times. Looking back on those four years, I recall the House of Lords dispute and a light reference to blood flowing under Westminster Bridge, railway and coal strikes characterized by equally light breach of agreements, a campaign in favour of female suffrage marked by violence to person and destruction to property, and finally a wrangle over a Home Rule Bill that spread far beyond the walls of Westminster and ended in the raising and training of illegal volunteer armies in Ireland. Such a record in an ostensibly law-abiding country gives matter for reflection. Sometimes I think the cause may be found in the sudden industrial recovery after ten years' depression following the South African War. The new money was spent in so much riotous living, and from end to end there settled on the country a mood of fretful, crapulous irritation. 'An unpopular law? Disregard it!' That seemed the rule of life with a people that had no object but successive pleasure and excitement and was fast becoming a law unto itself.

When, therefore, O'Rane went to Yateley, he went in protest against the action of certain officers at the Curragh, who, holding the King's Commission and with some few years of discipline behind them, let it be known that in the event of certain orders being given they did not propose to obey them. Then, if ever, the country was near revolution; I still recall the astonishment and indignation of Radicalism and Labour. On the single question of Parliamentary control of the Army, O'Rane was returned for a constituency that had almost forgotten the sensation of being represented by anyone but a Conservative.

The reason why two and a half years elapsed between our conversation at the Embassy Ball and his election in 1914 has been a secret in the keeping of a few. I see no object in preserving the mystery any longer. In the summer of 1912 Mayhew came home for his annual leave and dining with us one night in Princes Gardens he mentioned that Budapest gossip was growing excited over the possibility of a disturbance in the Balkans. It was a Bourse rumour, and the Czar of Bulgaria was credited with having operated the markets in such a way that a war of any kind would leave him a considerably richer man. I asked O'Rane for confirmation, and he informed me carelessly that some of his diplomatic friends were expecting trouble.

A few weeks later Mayhew invited me to dine and bring O'Rane. We had a small party in Princes Gardens that night, so I told him to join us and sent a note to Raney's flat. Mayhew duly arrived, but I heard nothing from O'Rane.

"War's quite certain," I was told, when we were left to ourselves. "I'm working to get sent out as correspondent for the 'Wicked World' and I wondered if you or Raney would care to come too. You'll get fine copy for that paper of yours, and as he knows that part of the world and speaks the language——"

"It's a pity he couldn't come to-night," I said. "Frankly, Mayhew, I don't see myself as a war correspondent. I don't know how it's done——"

"Everything must have a beginning," he urged. "I don't either."

"But I've not got the physical strength to go campaigning. I should crack up."

"You'll miss a lot if you don't come. You know, a series of articles for 'Peace' on the 'Horrors of Modern War'...."

It was at that point that my uncle, who had been half-listening to our conversation, dropped into a chair by Mayhew's side.

"A very good idea," he observed. "Don't be idle, George. It'll be a valuable experience."

Between them they bore down my opposition, and, while Mayhew secured my passport and subjected it to innumerable consular visas, Bertrand ordered my kit by telephone and reserved me the unoccupied half of a compartment on the wagon-lits as far as the Bulgarian frontier.

On what followed I prefer not to dwell. We were treated with every mark of courtesy by the Bulgarian General Staff and—locked in an hotel in Sofia with a military guard at the door till the war was over. Mayhew is ordinarily a charming companion, as were no doubt the two or three dozen other war correspondents who shared our fate, but I grew to loathe his presence almost as bitterly as he came to loathe mine. I am told that Sofia is an interesting city, though I had no opportunity of examining it; I am told, too, that our hotel was the best, though I had no standard of comparison whereby to judge it. Happiness came to me for the first time when I mounted the gangway of an Austrian-Lloyd boat at Salonica and coasted unhurriedly round Greece and Dalmatia to Trieste. Our fellow-passengers included specimens of every race in the Levant and one or two outside it. The first night on board a Greek officer wrapped his uniform round a lump of coal and dropped it over the side.

"I can't stand the risk of being recognized," he told me. "You see, we were all forbidden by proclamation to depart from strict neutrality."

"And yet, my dear Raney," I said, as I lit a cigar and walked arm in arm with him along the deck, "you are the man who chastises us for our want of discipline."

"I felt I owed myself a smack at Turkey," he answered, gazing over the sapphire-blue Ægean to the vanishing coastline of Greece. "It must be kept quiet or you'll get me into rather serious trouble."

And from that day to this I have never asked or answered where O'Rane went when he left London in the late summer of 1912 and stayed away till the winter of the following year. It is now too late to harm him by putting the facts on paper.

Mayhew left us at Trieste and went by way of Vienna to Budapest. O'Rane and I returned to England, and two days after our arrival in town I invited him to dine with me. His man told me by telephone that he had sailed that morning for Mexico, and I gathered was trying to realize his property before the smouldering disorder there burst into a flame of civil war. He was absent from England all the summer of 1913, and, when he returned, it was in company of the so-called James Morris, and the Mexican oil venture was at an end. I never learned the terms on which they had sold out, but there was a heavy sacrifice. O'Rane, with characteristic optimism, expressed satisfaction at getting anything at all and sent Morris to Galicia and northern Italy to sink his experience and the proceeds of the sale in fresh oil speculations. In the late autumn they set up a joint establishment in Gray's Inn, selected, after due deliberation, as the place where an American citizen who had broken off diplomatic relations with his family was least likely to be molested.

After the weariness of my imprisonment in Sofia I felt entitled to spend the summer of 1913 in seeking relaxation. With O'Rane and Loring abroad I fell back for companionship on my cousin, Alan Hunter-Oakleigh. He was home from India on leave, and, as nothing would induce him to bury himself in Dublin, the family came over and took a flat in town—to the mortification of his wild young brother Greville, who held the not uncommon view that a man should not belong to the same club as his father or inhabit the same capital as his mother. Violet came protesting, as the conventional delights of the Season were beginning to pall on her, and the only member of the family who extracted profit from the change of home was the youngest brother, Laurence, who could now spend his Leave-out days from Melton in an orgy of dissipation for which one or other of his relations was privileged to pay.

I always count myself an Irishman until fate flings me into the arms of my cousins. Then I grow conscious of respectability, middle age and the solid seriousness of the Anglo-Saxon. A day with one of them was an adventure; a night with more than one almost invariably a catastrophe. For the early weeks of the season I shepherded Alan through half a hundred crowded and entirely blameless British drawing-rooms; we dined in all the approved restaurants and saw the same revue and musical comedy under a score of different names. Then he grew restless.

"This is too much like Government House," he complained of an Ascot Week ball at Bodmin Lodge with Royalty present. "I want a holiday from knee-breeches and twenty-one gun salutes. Low Life, George! Have you no Low Life to show me?"

I referred the question to Summertown, who was wandering about with a cigarette drooping from his lips and an anxious eye on the time.

"Wait just ten minutes," he begged us. "Greville and Fatty Webster have gone off to cut the electric-light wires."

"But why?" I asked.

"To cheer these lads up a bit," he answered, pointing a disgusted finger at the stiff, formal ballroom.

"Then I propose to leave at once," I said, making for the staircase.

"Oh, you'd better stay," he called after me. "Why, for all you know, you may get your pocket picked by a third-class royalty. Not everyone can say that, you know, and some of to-night's lot look proper Welshers. Just as you like, though, and, if you'd really rather go, I'll give you a scrambled egg at the 'Coq d'Or.'"

My cousin brightened visibly at the suggestion, and the three of us drove to a silent, ill-lit street off Soho Square. An impressive commissionaire admitted us to a small oak-panelled hall with a cloakroom on one side and a new mahogany counter on the other. A Visitors' Book lay open, and Summertown gravely inscribed in it the names of J. Boswell, Auchinleck; S. Johnson, Litchfield; and R. B. Sheridan, London. We descended to a glaring white and gold room, as new as everything else, with tables round the wall, a negro orchestra at one end and in the middle an open space for dancing. Replace the negroes with Hungarians, and the room was an exact replica of any cabaret in Budapest or Vienna.

As cicerone, Summertown enjoyed himself. By dint of addressing the waiters as 'Gerald,' the ladies as 'Billy' and demanding 'my usual table,' he secured us kidney omelettes, sweet champagne and the company of two lightly clad and strangely scented young women, whose serious occupation in life was twice daily to shuffle on to the Round House stage by way of a platform through the stalls, to the refrain of "Have you seen my rag-time ra-ags?" A swarthy Creole hovered within call and was urged to complete the party.

"Je suis femme mariÉe, m'sieur," she sighed, shaking her head.

"That's all right, old thing," Summertown reassured her. "We're all married—more or less—and we're only young once. Waitero! Uno chairo immediato damquick, what what! Well, lads, this is the 'Coq d'Or.' What about it?"

"It is an impressive scene," I replied.

The room was half empty when we arrived, but filled rapidly during the next hour. I observed Sir Adolf Erckmann presiding over a large party and saw numerous rather elderly young men whose lined faces and watchful eyes were familiar to me from music-hall promenades. A handful of professionals executed the Tango and Maxixe with much of the suggestiveness of which those dances are capable, but it was only when the twanging banjos changed to rag-time that the majority of our neighbours sheepishly unbent and put forth an assumption of joie de vivre.

"This is It," cried Summertown, jumping up excitedly with arched back and hunched shoulders. "Come on, Billy!"

In a moment they were locked in each other's arms, swaying slowly and shuffling down the length of the blazing gold and white room. The Creole proposed that she and Alan should follow Summertown's example, and, when he excused himself, made successful overtures to the other Round House lady whom we had been privileged to entertain.

"The metropolis is waking up," commented Alan as he watched the scene.

Elderly women were being navigated by anxious young men, elderly men pranced conscientiously with shrill young girls, whom they seemed to envelop in waves of shirt front and human flesh. Three rather intoxicated boys, with their hats on, gravely linked hands and circled unsteadily to a hiccoughed refrain of 'Nuts in May'; girls danced with girls, and a thin, long-haired man performed a pas seul with the aid of a banjo purloined from a member of the orchestra who had withdrawn in search of refreshment.

"There's been rather a boom in night-clubs lately," I explained. "People were tired of being turned out of the restaurants at half-past twelve."

"Do ladies come here?"

"You see them," I said.

Alan wrinkled his nose and turned his eyes to Sir Adolf Erckmann, who was dancing with a girl of about sixteen. Her little face with its powdered nose and painted lips was squeezed against his chest, one great arm twined round her waist and gripped her body to his own, the other circled her neck and rested ponderously on her left shoulder. Bald and scarlet from collar to scalp, Sir Adolf drooped top-heavily over her head; a cigar extended jauntily from the upper tangles of his beard, and a pair of rimless eyeglasses flapped at the end of their cord against the bare back of his partner.

"And who is our friend who has been through hell with his hat off?" Alan inquired.

I told him.

"They do these things better in Port Said," he observed.

Our evening was not hilariously amusing, and I am afraid Summertown must have caught us yawning and consulting our watches. Certainly he was as prompt with apologies as we with speeches of reassurance, and we reached Oxford Street and a cab rank in so great an odour of amity that Alan and I found ourselves pledged to dine with him and be introduced to every night-club of which he was a member.

And on four several occasions we repeated the desolating experience. By the end of a month I could pose as an authority and recognize the subtile differences that distinguished one from another. At the 'Azalea,' for example, the hall was oblong; at the 'Long Acre' there was a Hungarian orchestra; and the conventional white and gold of the others gave place to white and green at the 'Blue Moon.' For all their variety, however, there came a day when Alan and I decided that we would not eat another kidney omelette, nor drink another glass of sweet champagne, nor watch the gyrations of another free-list chorus girl.

"But you simply must come to the 'Cordon Bleu,'" cried Summertown, when I broke the news as we dined and played shove-ha'penny with the King's Guard in St. James's Palace. In his eyes we figured as two middle-aged converts who were showing a disposition to recant. "It's the cheeriest spot of all; you'll have no end of a time there."

"Why didn't you take us there before?" I asked, with resentful memory of my late endurance.

"The police were expected to raid it," he explained. "It's all right, that's blown over. I'll take you on Tuesday."

Rather than wound his feelings, we passed our word. The 'Cordon Bleu' was the epitome of all the others, and with Erckmann, Lord Pennington, Mrs. Welman and a train of little pink and white girls in short tight skirts, seemed to be weighted with more than a fair share of Apaches. Wearily we seated ourselves at one of the little tables and watched the party swelling. It was eighteen strong when we entered, with nine men who made a business-like supper and nine women who smoked endless cigarettes, talked in penetrating tones and called each other by unflattering nicknames. As a new couple came in, one of the girls jumped up to make way and began to dance. I was too short-sighted to recognize her at first, but, as she came nearer, our eyes met for a moment, and I bowed. Not very skilfully she pretended not to see me, but by ill-luck the music stopped a few minutes later when she was opposite our table.

"Miss Dainton and Fatty Webster of all people!" cried Summertown.

Sonia turned slowly and surveyed the group.

"George! And Captain Hunter-Oakleigh!" she exclaimed, with a fine start of surprise. "And Lord Summertown! I say, you are going it! I thought you were much too heavy for a night-club, George!"

"My cousin wanted to see Low Life," I explained, as I brought up a chair.

"But this isn't low! All the best people come here. Has anybody got a cig.?"

Alan offered her his case, and she leant back with her hands clasped behind her head and her eyes half closed, inhaling the smoke and languidly blowing it out through her nose. For the "Cordon Bleu" her costume was admirably chosen—a tight-fitting dove-grey skirt slashed open to the knee on one side and revealing transparent stockings and satin shoes laced criss-cross up to the shin; the waist was high, and at the waist the dress stopped short, leaving arms and back bare to the shoulder blades; she wore no gloves, and the remains of a grey net scarf protruded from her partner's tail-pocket. Out of the Russian ballet I hardly remember seeing a girl more sparingly attired.

Webster was in his customary condition of silence and sticky heat. I sometimes wonder how a man whose utterance was restricted to four words at a time could have been involved in an action for breach of promise, yet there has never been any doubt that he paid substantial compensation. Apoplectically he grunted "Thanks," when Summertown plied him with champagne, and sat thoughtfully drinking until Sonia expressed a wish to go on dancing. Without having spent an unduly vicious youth I knew by a certain glaze over Webster's eyes that he would be imprudent to undertake such violent exercise. At Sonia's bidding, however, he clutched the table and rose with an effort to his feet. Only when he continued to stand there rocking gently from side to side did she turn a rather scared face to me with the words:

"Fatty's tired. Come and dance, George. It's a waltz; you can manage that."

Lest a worse thing befall her, I threw myself into the breach and waltzed to a couple of unoccupied chairs at the far end of the room.

"Are you going to be a sport, George?" she inquired a little uncertainly as we sat down.

"What exactly does that mean?" I asked.

She looked at me with her head on one side.

"I shan't be popular if you tell mother you've seen me here," she explained.

"But you said all the best people came here," I reminded her. "Where are you supposed to be—officially?"

"Surrey House. I'm going back there in a minute. It was frightfully dull, but we did our best until Mrs. Wemley—it's her ball, you know—had the cheek to come up and say she didn't like to see the one-step done. That put the lid on! These old frumps will be going back to lanciers and barn-dances next. Fatty and I wandered out to smoke a cig. when a taxi drifted providentially by and brought us here."

I got up and looked at my watch.

"And now I'm going to take you back there," I said.

"I must wait till Fatty's sobered down a bit," she answered, looking across the room at her somnolent partner. "If the worst comes to the worst, I can always say that Sir Adolf invited me."

"You're coming now," I said. "It's the price of my silence."

She lay comfortably back in her chair with her legs crossed, swinging one foot.

"Rot! You wouldn't be such a sneak," she began.

"Now, Sonia," I repeated.

She looked at me, shrugged her shoulders and walked up the stairs in silence. I scribbled a note to Alan, put her in a taxi, and drove to Surrey House.

"I suppose you're not in a mood for good advice?" I asked, as we drove along Oxford Street.

"No-p," she answered shortly, and I held my peace. Curiosity, however, got the better of her, and she inquired whether I imagined she was not capable of looking after herself.

"I was wondering whether you appreciated what kind of woman frequents a place like the 'Cordon Bleu'?" I said.

"My dear George, I wasn't born yesterday," she answered.

"But if you dress in the same way, go to the same places, sup with the same men——"

"The difference is that I know where to stop, George."

"That knowledge is not common with your sex. In any case, the people who see you there——"

"Oh, damn public opinion!" she interrupted irritably. "People who know me know I'm all right; people who don't know me don't matter. And that's all."

"And here's Surrey House," I said, as the taxi slowed down. "I haven't been invited, so I won't come in. If I were you, I should avoid men who don't know when they've drunk as much as is good for them."

"Good night, grandpapa!" she answered, as she ran up the steps and disappeared inside the house.

III

The autumn and winter of 1913 I divided between Ireland and the Riviera. When I came back to London the following spring, Amy Loring told me that her brother had returned. Ostensibly his yacht had to be fitted with new engines, and while in England he was taking the opportunity of attending to a little business. At the time of our conversation he was at House of Steynes, and, as soon as the tour of inspection was over, there would be nothing to keep him.

"Do see if you can knock some sense into him," Amy begged me despairingly. "It's perfectly ridiculous his wandering about all over the world like this. Mother feels it frightfully."

"What is he like now?" I asked.

She brushed back the curls from her forehead and made a gesture of impatience.

"I don't know. He's horribly ironical. Nothing in life is worth doing, according to him. He smiles politely and sneers politely.... And all the time, you know, I'm sure he's as lonely and melancholy as can be. That engagement was an awful business, George. He was very much in love with her——"

"And she treated him abominably," I said, lighting a cigarette.

"Yes, I think she did," Amy answered deliberately. "It wasn't his fault. Of course, it's not every woman who could marry him, he's—difficile; but the way he behaved to her was perfectly angelic. Now he's lost faith in everything.... Do see if you can't do anything for him; he's bored to the verge of distraction, being by himself all this time."

I promised to do what I could, and on the night of his return to London we dined together. It was the last evening of the Melton holidays, and I had organized a small theatre party for my cousin Laurence,—Violet and Amy were with us,—and, as the ordering of the arrangements was in Laurence's youthful but self-confident hands, we sat in the deafening neighbourhood of a powerful coon band and dined incongruously off unlimited hors d'oeuvres, a Nesselrode ice-pudding and—so far as I can remember—nothing else. Still at his order we drank sparkling Burgundy, variously described by him as a 'pretty tipple' and by Loring as 'warm knife-wash.' We spent the evening in a theatre where we were forbidden to smoke and supped off Strasbourg pie and iced cider-cup in a restaurant where two persistent dancers whirled their bewildering way in and out of the tables.

"A pretty useful evening," said my cousin, as we dispatched him to bed; and I had not the heart to undeceive him.

"Remember me to Burgess, Laurie," said Loring, and turning to Violet, "I wonder if you keep a little brandy in this flat? My digestion is not what it once was."

Life is a tangle of incongruities, and at one o'clock in the morning, in a St. James's Court flat, with Mrs. Hunter-Oakleigh sleeping on one side of us and Laurence on another, we formally welcomed Loring back to London over a supplementary meal of bread, cheese and liqueur brandy. Warming to the work, we summoned O'Rane by telephone from Gray's Inn. It was half-past three, and dawn was lighting up the sky, when Amy broke up the party by demanding to be taken home to bed.

"And now you're back in England, you're going to stay here?" Violet inquired, as she and Loring shook hands.

"I can't get away for a bit," was the answer. "What with this engine——"

"Will you stay long enough to make your apologies?" she asked, looking at him through narrowed lids.

"But what have I done?" he inquired anxiously.

"A halfpenny postcard—any time—just to show you were still alive——"

"But I didn't write to anyone——" he protested.

Violet laughed and turned to the door. In the subdued yellow light her grave beauty was very attractive. Though she smiled still, her eyes were wistful, and I chose to fancy she had not outgrown her old affection so quickly as Loring.

"My dear, I'm not jealous!" she said. "As a mark of friendship, though——"

"Violet, I'm frightfully sorry!" he exclaimed, taking an eager step towards her. "Will that do?"

"Are you going off again?"

"I shall stay as long as there's anything to stay for."

The direct and obvious route from St. James's Court either to Princes Gardens or Gray's Inn is perhaps not by Curzon Street, but it was so long since we had been together that O'Rane and I sat talking in the library of Loring House until there was barely time for a Turkish bath before breakfast. The Yately seat was vacant, and Raney proposed to begin his canvass in two days' time. He was full of rhetoric and indignation on the condition of Ireland and rehearsed his election speeches at some length.

"It's as bad as you like," Loring interrupted, "but it won't come to anything."

"Are you in the Special Reserve?" O'Rane asked suddenly.

"I believe I've got an honorary rank of some kind as a Lord Lieutenant," answered Loring, "but I'm not on the active list. What's the Special Reserve been doing?"

"I hear they received secret preparatory mobilization orders in March," said O'Rane. "It's not supposed to be known, but one of the military attachÉs told me. This is April. What's it all about?"

"The Government won't mobilize the Regular Army for a row of this kind," said Loring contemptuously.

"Well, what are they doing it for, then?"

But O'Rane's question was unanswered for another four months.

Loring accompanied me to the Turkish Baths, and we lay on adjoining couches sipping coffee and lazily discussing what had taken place during his absence from England. If ever a man was bored and dissatisfied, that man was Loring. A certain pride kept him away from the House of Lords, he had neither the age nor the energy to qualify him for a Governorship and was yet too old and substantial in mind to be amused by a purely social life.

"Old Burgess was right, you know, George," he yawned. "I've had a damned wasted experience. And the Lord knows how it will end. What is there to do?"

"I should spend a few weeks in town," I suggested. "You've probably had enough of your own company."

"God! Yes! Only London, you know.... D'you see much of the Daintons? You can speak quite freely. After all I was engaged to her for nearly a year, and it's been broken off for three."

I finished my coffee rather deliberately and lit a fresh cigarette.

"She has not improved, Jim," I said.

He lay back and stared at the ceiling.

"I used to think.... You know, George, I've got to an age when I ought to marry."

"So has she," I observed, tucking my towels round me and beginning to brush my hair. "I'm coming round to Bertrand's view that an unmarried woman of five-and-twenty is a public danger, particularly when husband-hunting is conducted with its present healthy absence of restraint. The spinster is not so much an object of pity as an offence against nature, and Nature punishes any liberty you take with her. In the old days we had our convents where superfluous women could retire with dignity. That at least whited the outside of the sepulchre. The present London Season is a pathological study. You'll see for yourself."

He rose slowly from the bed and began to get into his clothes.

"I don't think I shall be much in town if I'm going to run into the Daintons everywhere," he answered.

Only three days later I was able to tell him that this last danger had been removed. Bertrand and I had arranged to hear "Parsifal" at Covent Garden, and, as his box was large, he offered a seat to Violet—the one woman of his family whom he treated with paternal kindness. There was still room for another, and I invited Loring to join us. Nothing is more repugnant to my taste than to interfere with the destinies of others, but when Amy petitioned me in person I could not decently refuse.

"He can't tell one note from another," I expostulated, "and the thing starts at five. He'll be reduced to tears."

"If he doesn't want to come, he needn't accept," she answered. "All I ask you to do is to give him the invitation."

"Well, will you invite him—from me?"

"No, I want you to send him a note. The time, and where to meet, and the arrangements for dinner—and who's to be there."

Without further protest I sat down and wrote as I was bid.

"Tell him not to talk through the Good Friday music," I begged.

"I shan't tell him anything," said Amy. "I don't know anything about the plan; it's just a thought that's casually occurred to you——"

"I knew I should have the blame put on me," I answered resignedly.

When the night arrived there was little blame to apportion, and Loring thanked me effusively for my invitation. Between the acts we dined at the Savoy and were returning to our box when I caught sight of Sonia waiting for her party in the hall. Fortunately the others had gone on ahead before our, eyes met.

"I haven't seen you for an age," she began pleasantly, in apparent forgetfulness of a peevish meeting at the 'Cordon Bleu' the previous summer.

"Are you up for the season?" I asked.

"No, I'm going abroad next week. Sir Adolf's getting up a motor tour through France and Italy, ending up at Bayreuth in time for the Festival. Lord Pennington, Mrs. Welman, Sir Adolf, his sister,—the Baroness, you know,—Fatty Webster and me. I'm with Fatty to-night."

"Are your people in town?" I asked, as I prepared to follow my party. Webster is a man I do not go out of my way to meet.

"Father is, but mother's tired of London, so I'm staying with Mrs. Ilkley. She's a model chaperon and all that sort of thing, but she will live out in the Cromwell Road. It's a fearful bore."

"A most respectable quarter," I commented.

"It's a rotten hole when you've got an hour and a half to dine and dress and get back here in," she grumbled. "I didn't try. I just changed in Fatty's flat; that's why he's late. The poor soul's only got one bedroom, so I monopolized it while he was gorging. By the way, that's not necessarily for publication, as they say."

"Why on earth did you tell me?" I asked, with the mild exasperation of a man who resents youthful attempts to shock his sense of propriety.

"I thought you wanted cheering up," Sonia answered airily. "You're so mid-Victorian."

"You're getting too old for this eternal ingÉnue business, Sonia," I said. "And yet not old enough to avoid coming a very complete cropper. Don't say I didn't warn you?"

When I got back to the box Loring was raking the stalls with his opera-glass. As Sonia and Webster came in, he gave a slight start and sat far back in his chair. No one else noticed the movement, but I had time to scribble, "She is going abroad immediately," on my programme and hand it to him before the lights were lowered. At supper he announced without preface that he proposed to spend at least part of the Season in London.

With the detachment of one who has never taken even social dissipation with the seriousness it deserves, it flatters my sanity to describe the condition of England in these years as essentially neurotic. In retrospect I see stimulus succeeding stimulus, from the Coronation year—when all expected a dull reaction after the gaiety of King Edward's reign—to 1912, when an over-excited world feared a reaction after the Coronation year. This dread of anti-climax caused the carnival of 1912 to be eclipsed in the following spring, and, when Loring invited me to assist him in "one last fling before we settle down," we found that 1914—with its private balls and public masquerades, its Tango Teas and Soupers Dansants, its horseplay and occasional tragedies—was bidding fair to beat the records of its predecessors.

For three and a half months we seemed hardly to be out of our dress-clothes. Valentine Arden, as usual, let his flat and took a suite at the Ritz, from which he descended nightly at the invitation of a seemingly inexhaustible stream of people with sufficient money to spend fifteen hundred pounds on a single night's entertainment. Nightly there came the same horde of pleasure-seekers, some of them girls I had been meeting regularly for ten years, at first sight no nearer to any settled purpose in life. I think it is not altogether the fancy of an ageing and jaundiced eye to see a strain of vulgarity spreading over Society at this time; for, though Erckmann chanced to be abroad, his flashy followers had established their footing and remained behind to prove that money can open every door. Lady Isobel Mayre, daughter of the Minister of Fine Arts, gave them an entrÉe to Ministerial society; the poverty of Lord Roehampton enabled them to add a Marquess's scalp to their belt, and the old distinction between smartness and respectability broke down. The prohibited dances and fashions of one year struggled to become the next year's vogue. To be inconspicuous was to be dÉmodÉ.

"The fact is, we're too old to stay the course," Loring said regretfully at supper one morning towards the end of June. "George, let me remind you that you and I are as near thirty-five as makes no odds. Amy, you're thirty. Violet, you're—well, you look about nineteen."

"Add ten to it," Violet suggested.

"We're all too old; we must give it up. You're all coming to Hurlingham with me next week, aren't you? And then we'll ring down the curtain and say good-bye to London."

"One must live somewhere," I said, with an uneasy feeling that his new way of life might involve my spending the greater part of the year in County Kerry.

Loring lit a cigarette and gazed with disfavour round the garish room.

"Either I shall marry," he said, "or else go and live abroad."

IV

The Hurlingham Ball at the beginning of July 1914 was the last of its kind I ever attended—probably the last I shall ever attend. We went a party of eight, as Loring wanted to offer O'Rane a complimentary dinner after his election at Yately, and Mayhew conveniently arrived in London for his summer leave as the tickets were being ordered. To an outsider we must have presented a curious study in contrasts. Amy Loring had confided to me her certainty that her brother would propose to Violet before the evening was out, and four of us were therefore in a state of watchful anxiety. Of the other four, the two girls spent their time affecting interest in a heated political discussion in which O'Rane and Mayhew, with a fine disregard of fitness, were volubly engaged.

"Well, I'll tell you something you don't know," said Mayhew, when we were by ourselves at the end of dinner and the last of a dozen preposterous stories had been exploded by O'Rane. "The Archduke Franz Ferdinand has gone with his wife for a tour through Bosnia——"

"Even I knew that," I said, as I cut my cigar.

"Don't interrupt," Mayhew urged. "I'll lay anybody a hundred to one they don't come back alive."

There was a suitably dramatic pause as he sat back with hand extended waiting for his wager to be taken.

"He's the heir, isn't he?" Loring inquired. "Is this some beastly new riddle?"

"It's the solution of a very old one," said O'Rane gravely. "The Archduke married a morganatic wife who'll be Queen of Hungary and can't be Empress of Austria. It'll save a lot of complication if they're put out of the way. After all, it's only two human lives."

"But—is this known?" I asked Mayhew in astonishment.

"It's being openly discussed in Budapest——"

"And London," O'Rane put in.

"Confound you, Raney," Mayhew cried. "You hear everything."

"It's a pretty story, even if it isn't quite new," said O'Rane. "I shan't take your bet, though, Mayhew; you're too likely to win. You see," he went on, turning to us, "the Bosnians simply hate the Archduke, so it'll look quite plausible if anyone says they've blown him up on their own initiative. And then Austria will have a wolf-and-lamb excuse for saying Servia was responsible and annexing her, just as she did with Bosnia and Herzegovina six years ago. This is the way Powers and Potentates go to work in our enlightened twentieth century."

The discussion was interrupted by a footman entering to say that the cars were at the door. It was still daylight when we began to motor down, but we arrived to find the gardens lit with tiny avenues of fairy lights and to be greeted with music borne distantly on the warm, flower-laden breeze. For an hour I danced or wandered under the trees watching the whirl of bright dresses through the open ballroom windows. Loring and Violet had disappeared from view and only returned to us at supper-time so exaggeratedly calm and self-possessed that Amy squeezed my arm warningly as we entered the Club House.

"George, I've come to the conclusion that we must have one more ball before we settle down," he said, as we drew our chairs in to the table.

"This is about the last of the season," I warned him.

He waved away the objection.

"I'll give one myself—just to a few friends and neighbours at Chepstow—some time about the end of the month before everybody's scattered. I'm giving it in Violet's honour."

We turned to look at her, and the self-possession gradually faded out of her face.

"Violet, is it true?" Amy asked, jumping up in her excitement.

She nodded, with very bright eyes.

"I will not have a scene!" Loring exclaimed. "Amy, sit down! If you try to kiss me in public.... Now, do try to look at the thing reasonably. It might have happened to anyone; it has, in fact, happened to a number of people. As for speeches and glass-waving.... Look how well George takes it! No nonsense about being glad to have me as a cousin, no grousing because he'll have to be best man—oh, we've arranged all that, my son—he just sits and drains a second bumper of champagne before anyone else has finished his first.... Amy, I shan't speak about it again!"

"My dear, I'm so happy," said his sister, subsiding with moist eyes into her chair.

"We're tolerably satisfied ourselves," Loring admitted. "Aren't we, Violet?"

But Violet made no reply beyond a quick nod of the head that was not yet quick enough to hide the trembling of her lips.