Then the man's face lit up with curiosity. 

"Yours is a New Mercury, isn't it?" he cried. "Was that car at Brighton on Wednesday night?" 

"Yes," growled Medenham; he knew what to expect, and his face was grim beneath the tan. 

"But you were not driving it," said the other. 

"A chap named Dale was in charge then." 

"Oh, is that it? You've brought two ladies here just now?" 

"Yes." 

"Good! My guv'nor's on the lookout for 'em. He didn't tell me so, but he made sure they hadn't passed this way when we turned up." 

"And when was that?" asked Medenham, feeling unaccountably sick at heart. 

"Soon after lunch. Ran here from Bristol. There's a bad bit of road over the Mendips, but the rest is fine. I s'pose we'll all be hiking back there to-night?" 

"Most probably," agreed Medenham, who said least when he was most disturbed; at that moment he could cheerfully have wrung Count Edouard Marigny's neck. 

CHAPTER VA FLURRY ON THE MENDIPS 

It is a contrariety of human nature that men devoted to venturesome forms of sport should often be tender-hearted as children. Lord Medenham, who had done some slaying in his time, once risked his life to save a favorite horse from a Ganges quicksand, and his right arm still bore the furrows plowed in it by claws that would have torn his spaniel to pieces in a Kashmir gully had he not thrust the empty barrels of a .450 Express rifle down the throat of an enraged bear. 

In each case, a moment's delay to secure his own safety meant the sacrifice of a friend, but safety won at such a price would have galled him worse than the spinning of a coin with death. 

Wholly apart from considerations that he was strangely unwilling to acknowledge, even to his own heart, he now resented Marigny's cold-blooded pursuit of an unsuspecting girl mainly because of its unfairness. Were Cynthia Vanrenen no more to him than the hundreds of pretty women he would meet during a brief London season he would still have wished to 

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