ends to tie up. It seemed when he reached the hall that de Daun must have been waiting for him. They went out together.

“Serious thing this about Vaux House,” the Baron remarked, in quite a concerned voice. “I say, Greetland, between ourselves, was the Countess,” he gave a jerk of the head in the direction of the house they had just left, “one of the women talked of with Martindale?”

“I fancy she was,” the other answered, looking straight in front of him.

[36]Tatler as he was, he knew de Daun, and did not care to be pumped to serve the thirst of that blatant young diplomat.

[36]

“It seemed rather curious, to say the least of it,” his companion persisted, “her affecting to doubt the truth of the story. I wonder if the sword hair-pin was hers.”

He looked round at Greetland with the quick turn of a bird of prey.

“Oh, that’s going too far,” Greetland cried, throwing up his hand half way in protest, then full length to hail a passing hansom.

[37]

CHAPTER IV THE DUCAL POINT OF VIEW

THE Daily Comet came out next day with its threatened sensational blazon: the world of London and beyond greedily assimilated the startling tale, and their Graces the Duke and Duchess of Lancashire began to have an exceedingly unpleasant time of it. The Duke especially; since he had the Duchess, as well as the Press and the rest of the world, to encounter. He had done nothing wrong (with the exception of that bribe to the late Dr. Blaydon) or even foolish, he told himself, for his little arrangement with the doctor had been highly expedient; yet the affair had, by the merest chance, taken this unfortunate turn, and he suddenly found his ducal neck and wrists in a moral pillory, with a shower of rotten eggs unpleasantly imminent. Under the circumstances he judged it wise to confine his perambulations within the precincts of Vaux House; happily its grounds were extensive, and for the first time in his life as he dispiritedly paced them, he omitted to regret the waste they represented of colossally remunerative building sites. He simply dared not show his face in the streets—not even the streets that he owned—and as to going into one of his clubs, including the House of Lords, why, he would as soon have walked into the crater of Vesuvius. So he 

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