she mused. "And if I don't pay you the doubtful compliment of saying that you have the Balliol manner, you have at least a kind of subtilized reminiscence of it."

"I must keep a guard upon myself," said John. "She's visiting an Austrian woman who lives in a remote wing of the castle,—the pavilion beyond the clock, in fact,—an Austrian woman of the exhilarating name of Brandi."

"I'm rather in luck for my dinner to-night," said Lady Blanchemain. "I've got Agnes Scope, the niece of the Duke of Wexmouth. She arrived here this morning with her aunt, Lady Louisa. Of course I'm putting you next to her. As, besides being an extremely nice girl and an heiress, she's an ardent pervert to Romanism,—well, a word to the wise."

"Yes, I know her," said John. "We don't get on a bit. She moves on far too high a plane for a groundling like me. She's intellectual and earnest, and my ignorance and light-mindedness wound her to the quick. She'll end, as I've told her to her face, by writing books,—serious novels, probably,—which she'll illuminate with beautiful irrelevant quotations from Browning and Cardinal Newman."

"Bother," said Lady Blanchemain. "You're perverse."

"Besides," said John, "she's engaged."

"Engaged—?" faltered Lady Blanchemain.

"Yes—to an intellectual and earnest man, named Blake—Bernard Blake—a grandson of the famous Blake of Cambridge."

Lady Blanchemain fixed him with darkening eyes.

"Are you sure?" she pleaded.

"I saw it officially stated in the Morning Post," was John's relentless answer.

"What a nuisance," said Lady Blanchemain, fanning. Her fan was of amber tortoise-shell, with white ostrich feathers, and the end sticks bore her cypher and coronet in gold.

"What a jolly fan," said John.

"Well, well," said Lady Blanchemain, reconciling herself. Then, after an instant of pensiveness, "So you're already laid low by her beauty. But you haven't found out yet who she is?"

"Who who is?" said John, looking all at 

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