"Ascot, Sunninghill!" Mrs. Verulam said, with an intonation of pretty bewilderment which was not assumed.

[Pg 39]

[Pg 39]

Mr. Rodney withdrew his eyes from his feet rather suddenly and looked at Mrs. Verulam.

"Surely you have not forgotten that in the early spring you commissioned me to get you Ribton Marches for the race week," he murmured, with a sort of soporific reproach.

"Oh! did I? Of course; now I remember."

"Only now?" He contrived a sigh that was an art product, and resumed: "I opened delicate negotiations about the matter on February the fourteenth, and have been proceeding carefully ever since. One false step would have been instant destruction."

"My dear Mr. Rodney——"

"Instant destruction," he repeated, with a slight sforzando, "owing to the temper of the owner, Mr. Lite, the Bun Emperor."

"The Bun Emperor!"

"He is universally named so by the children of the British Isles, for whom he—caters, I think they call it."

"Dear me! how many words there are in the dictionary that one never hears in society."

"Mercifully—most mercifully! Mr. Lite is a man of very peculiar proclivities. I have made a minute study of them in order to carry out your instructions successfully."

"It is most good and industrious of you."

"Oh, I shrink from nothing in such a cause. He is, I must tell you, a man of violent temper and enormous means, devoted to home life, and extremely suspicious of strangers."

"What a terrible combination of idiosyncrasies!"

"Precisely. My difficulty was to dislodge a man of such a character from his 'temple of domesticity,' as he[Pg 40] calls it, even for one week. There were, I confess it, moments in which despair seized me, and I could have cried aloud, like an Eastern pilgrim, 'Allah has turned his face from me!'"

[Pg 40]

"I am quite ashamed to have given you so much trouble. Is that really what 

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