Christian, professing to himself momentarily that the chance to get away from his guests was at hand, discovered that his escape, all the same, was no easy matter.

Kathleen had disappeared somewhere, and without her he seemed curiously helpless. He did not as yet know the house well enough to be sure about its exits. The result of one furtive attempt at flight was to find himself in the midst of a group of county people, who fell back courteously at his approach and, as if by design, let him become involved in a quite meaningless conversation with a purple-faced, bull-necked old gentleman whose name he could not remember. This person talked at tremendous length, producing his words in gurgling spasms; his voice was so husky and his manner so disconcerting—not to mention the peculiarities of the local dialect in which he spoke—that Christian could make literally nothing of his remarks. He maintained a vapid listener’s-smile, the while his eyes roamed despondently about the room, and what he could see of the next apartment, in search of some relief. If he could hit upon Dicky Westland—or even Edward or Augustine!

It became apparent to him, at last, that his interlocutor was discoursing on the subject of dogs. Of course—it would be about the Caermere hounds. On the grave faces of those about him, who stood near enough to hear the sounds of this mysterious monologue, he read signs that they considered themselves a party to it. It was on their behalf as well as his own that the old gentleman was haranguing him—and he swiftly perceived the necessity of paying better attention.

“The hounds—yes,” he said, after a little. “I have been making inquiries about them. I am advised that they cannot be kept up properly for less than four thousand five hundred a year.”

“Up to Lord Porlock’s death, we had something like twenty-four hundred pounds from the Castle, and we made a whip-round among ourselves,” the other replied, “for the rest. With corn what it is, and rents what they are, we’re all so poor now that it’ll be harder than ever to get subscriptions, but we’ll try to do our share if the Castle’ll meet us half-way.”

Christian felt that he liked being referred to as “the Castle.” Moreover, an idea suddenly took shape in his mind. “My uncle, Lord Porlock, was the Master,” he said. “And before him my grandfather, I believe. But what has been done since Lord Porlock’s death—about a new Master, I mean?”

Out of the complicated response made to this question he gathered vaguely that nothing had been done—that nothing could have been done.

“My cousin, Captain Torr, is a hunting man, I think.” He threw out the question with some diffidence, and was vastly relieved to see the faces brighten about him.

“None better, by God!” affirmed the old gentleman, with vehemence, and there followed a glowing and spluttering eulogium of Edward’s sportsmanlike qualities and achievements, in the middle of which Christian recalled that the speaker was Sir George Dence.

“I like the Mastership to continue in the family, Sir George,” he replied, suavely proud of the decision he had leaped to. “I think I shall suggest to you that Captain Edward take the hounds, and that, for a time at least, you allow the Castle to be at the entire expense. At all events, you have my annual subscription of five thousand pounds to begin upon.”

He made a dignified half-bow in the silence which ensued, and boldly moved away. The murmur of amazed admiration which rose behind him was music in his ears.

Visions of possible escape rose for the moment before him. He walked with an air of resolution through the next room, trying to remember whither the corridor outside led—but at the doorway he stopped face to face with Lord Lingfield.

“Ah,” said his cousin, amiably, “I did not know if I should see you again. I thought perhaps that you had gone to lie down. Funerals take it out of one so, don’t they? My father is quite seedy since lunch, and poor Lady Cressage has the most wretched headache! I think myself she’d do better not to travel while it lasts, but she’s anxious to get away, and so we’re all off by the evening train.”

“Oh, I didn’t dream of your hurrying off like this,” exclaimed Christian, sincerely enough. “But if you are set upon it—come, let’s find your father. It will seem as if I had neglected him.”

“He’s in his room,” explained Lord Lingfield, as they moved away together, “getting into some heavier clothes. The evenings are chilly here in the hills, and we’re to start almost immediately, and take the long drive round through the forest. Lady Cressage has talked so much of it, and we’ve never seen it, you know.”

“But this is all too bad!” urged Christian. “You rush away before I have had time to have a word with any of you. There is no urgent reason for such haste, is there now, really?”

“Lady Cressage seems anxious to go,” answered the other, with a kind of significance in his solemn voice. “And of course—since she came with us——”

Christian stole a quick glance at his kinsman, and as swiftly looked away. “If she prefers it—of course,” he commented with brevity.

“Do you think she is very strong?” asked Lord Lingfield. “I have a kind of fear, sometimes, that her health is not altogether robust. She seemed very pale to-day.” There was a note of obvious solicitude in his voice.

“She has a headache,” Christian reminded him.

“Yes, that would account for it, wouldn’t it?” The young man was visibly relieved by this reflection. “They may say what they like,” he went on, “she is the most beautiful woman in London to-day, just as she was when she was married. Let me see—I am not sure that I ever knew her precise age. Do you happen to know?”

“She is four-and-twenty.”

“Not more! I should have said six, or at least five. Hm-m! Four-and-twenty!” The reiteration, for some reason, seemed to afford him pleasure. “I am nearly thirty myself,” he added meditatively, “and I’m practically sure of being in the next Government. Shall you go in much for politics, do you think? It wouldn’t be of any great use to you, except the Garter, perhaps, and it’s so fearfully slow waiting for that. My father had the promise of it as long ago as Lord John Russell’s time, and it hasn’t come off yet. But then that Home Rule business was so unfortunate—it sent us all over to the Tory side, where there were already more people waiting for things than there were things to go round. If I were you, I would keep very quiet for a year or two—not committing myself openly to either side. I can’t help thinking there will be a break-up. It’s a fearful bore to have only twenty or thirty people on one side and five hundred on the other. They won’t stand it much longer. It doesn’t make a fair distribution of things. Of course, I’m a unionist, but if I were in your shoes, I’d think it over very carefully. The Liberals haven’t got a single Duke—and mind you, though people don’t seem to notice it, it is a fact that a party practically never succeeds itself. The Liberals are bound to come in, sooner or later—and then, if you were their only Duke, why, you’d get your Garter shot at you out of a gun—so to speak. Of course, I mustn’t be mentioned as saying this—but you think it over! And it needn’t matter in the least—our being in different parties.. We can help each other quite as well—indeed, sometimes I’m tempted to think even better. Of course, I dare say there won’t be much that I can do for you—for the next two or three years, at least—except in the way of advice, and tips, and that sort of thing—but there may be a number of matters that you can help me in.”

Christian nodded wearily—with a nervous thought upon the time being wasted. “I am not likely to forget your kindness—or our family ties,” he said, consciously evasive.

“You never saw Cressage, of course; awful beast!” remarked the other, with an irrelevancy which still struck the listener as having a certain method in it. “It makes a man furious to think what she must have suffered with him. And a mere child, too, when she was married. Only four-and-twenty now! These early marriages are a great mistake. Of course, when a man gets to be nearly thirty, and there is a family and property and so on to be handed along, why, then marriage becomes a duty. That has always been my view. And I try invariably to do my duty, as I see it. I think a man ought to, you know.”

Christian sighed, and restrained an impulse to look at his watch. They had sauntered forward into the central hallway; through the open door could be seen a carriage and pair drawn up before the steps. A rustle on the stairs behind him caught his ear, and turning, Christian beheld Lady Cressage descending toward him, with Lord Chobham looming, stately and severe, in the shadows above her.

Christian moved impulsively to her. “It was the greatest surprise to me—and disappointment, too—to hear that you were going like this,” he declared, with outstretched hand.

She smiled feebly, and regarded him with a pensive consideration. Her heavy mourning of an earlier hour had been exchanged for a black garb less ostentatiously funereal, yet including the conventional widow’s-fall, which he had not seen her wear before. The thought that here at Caermere, last autumn, she had not even worn a widow’s-cap, rose in his mind. It carried with it a sense of remissness, of contumacy as against the great family which had endowed her with one of its names. But at least now she exhibited a consciousness that her husband was less than a year dead. And her pallid face was very beautiful in its frame of black—a delicately strong face, meditative, reserved, holding sadness in a proud restraint. “I am not very well,” she said to him, in tones to reach his ear alone. “The crowd here depressed me. I could not bring myself to appear at luncheon. It seems better that I should go away.”

“But it is such a fatiguing journey—for one who does not feel wholly up to it!” he urged upon her. “All these strangers will be going—I think some of them have gone already. I don’t know what their rule is here about stopping after luncheon—but surely they must clear out very soon. Then we shall be quite by ourselves—so that if that is your only reason for going—why, I can’t admit that it is a reason at all.”

He paused, and strove to cover with a halting smile his sudden perception that they were not talking with candor to each other. There were things in her mind, things in his mind, which bore no relation to the words they uttered. She was looking at him musingly—and he felt that he could read in her glance, or perhaps gather from what there was not in her glance, that she would not go if he begged her with sufficient earnestness to remain. Nay, the conviction flashed vividly uppermost in his thoughts that even a tolerable simulation of this earnestness would be enough. It was as if a game were being played, in which he was not quite the master of his moves. In this mere instant of time, while they had stood facing each other, he had been able to reproduce the whole panorama of his contact with this beautiful woman. From that first memorable day when she had come into his wondering, distraught vision of the new life before him, to that other day but a week ago when he had stood trembling with passionate emotions in her presence, his mental pictures of her rose connectedly about him. They exerted a pressure upon his will. They left him no free agency in the matter. By all the chivalric, tenderly compassionate memories they evoked, he must bid her to remain.

“I am very sorry that you feel you must go,” was what he heard himself say instead.

“Good-bye,” she answered simply, and gave him her gloved hand with an impassive face. “Lord Chobham and Lord Lingfield are good enough to see me back to London again. We are driving round through the forest. Our people are to join us at the station with the luggage. Goodbye.”

He accompanied the party out to the carriage door, despite some formal doubts about its being the proper thing to do. Both father and son made remarks to him, to which he seemed to himself to be making suitable answers, but what they were about he never knew. The tragedy of Edith’s final departure from Caermere—she who had been the hostess here when he came; she who was to have worn the coronet on her lovely brow as the mistress of it all—seized upon his mind and harrowed it. A vehement self-reproach that his thoughts should have done her even momentary injustice stung him, as he beheld her seated in the carriage. She smiled at him—that wistful, subdued smile of the headache—and then, as the horses moved, his eyes were resting upon another smile instead—the beaming of fatuous content upon the countenance of Lord Lingfield, who sat facing her.

Christian, regarding this second cousin of his as the carriage receded from view, suddenly breathed a long sigh of relief.

All at once remembering many things, he wheeled with the impulse to run up the steps. Upon reflection, he ascended them sedately instead, and gave orders in the hall that Mr. Westland should be sent to him forthwith. Two or more groups of departing guests came upon him, while he stood irresolutely here, and he bade them farewell with formal gravity. The two parsons whom he had seen at the church were among them—attired now in black garments with curiously ugly little round, flat hats—and he noted with interest that their smirking deference now displeased him less than it had done in the morning. He perceived that his lungs were becoming accustomed to the atmosphere of adu............