As A yachtsman Mr. Cornelius Blunn did not shine sartorially. As a guest and conversationalist at Grant’s improvised cruise on the following day he was easily the most popular man on board. Susan, who had been his neighbour at lunch, watched him pacing the deck, with a look almost of affection in her face.

“Princess,” she confided to Gertrude, “I think your friend, Mr. Blunn, is the most amusing man I’ve ever met.”

Gertrude smiled.

“He is one of those impossible persons who never grow up,” she declared. “A picnic like this is the joy of his life. He was simply delighted when I gave him Mr. Slattery’s message. The strange part of it is that he can scarcely cross the gangway of a steamer without being violently ill. Yet a cruise like this he simply revels in.”

“Make his fortune as a raconteur on the music-hall stage,” Bobby Lancaster chuckled. “Some of the stories he told after you girls had come up on deck!—there was one about a little Dutch girl. I really must—”

“Bobby,” Susan interrupted severely, “I am ashamed of you. The story will reach us all in due course through the proper channels. You will tell your sister, of course. She will tell me. And so on.”

“Then there was another about an Italian maid.”

His sister rose to her feet and thrust her arm through his.

“Bobby,” she said, “you and I will take a little walk. You have brought this upon yourself. I can’t see you chuckling there and leaving me to wonder what it’s about all the time. We’ll stroll down to the bows.”

“This roundabout business is trying but decent,” Susan observed. “I suppose I shall have to wait at least another quarter of an hour. In the meantime, Mr. Slattery, I adore your yacht.”

“She really is wonderful, Grant,” Gertrude intervened. “You hadn’t anything like this in the old days, had you?”

“Perhaps it was as well,” Susan murmured, with a rare impulse of ill humour.

Gertrude smiled across at her rival. Grant had scarcely left her side all day and she was beginning to feel a little sorry for this very charming young English girl to whom her coming was likely to prove so disastrous. Even the picnic had been arranged at her suggestion.

“Well, the yacht has arrived, and other things,” she remarked. “It is never too late in this world, so long as one has the will. Grant, I want to go to the Dutch East Indies.”

“I’d better tell him to put in at Naples and coal, then,” he suggested.

“You will kindly remember,” Susan observed, “that you have the Prime Minister of the greatest empire in the world on board, who will be required at Nice at a quarter to eleven to-morrow morning to preside over the little tea party there.”

“That is unfortunate,” Gertrude sighed. “Such a quarrelsome little tea party too, isn’t it?”

Lymane, who was seated in the little circle, moved in his chair uneasily. Grant turned slightly towards her.

“Quarrelsome, is it?” he repeated. “How do you know that?”

“Oh, the air is full of rumours,” she answered carelessly. “Yesterday, for instance, everybody was saying that that poor dear Baron Naga had committed suicide because America was to be invited once more to come into the Pact.”

“I thought it was because he found he had one funnel too many on his latest cruiser,” Bobby Lancaster remarked.

“Idiot!” his sister exclaimed. “That’s the business of the Limitation of Armaments Congress, not the Pact.”

“Naga, as a matter of fact, represented his country on both Boards,” Lymane pointed out. “Too much for one man. I know that he dreaded that journey to Washington every year.”

The stewards appeared with tea. Lord Yeovil and Cornelius Blunn joined the little group. The latter removed his hat, dragged his chair out to where he could set the full benefit of the sunlight and the breeze, and smiled on every one beatifically.

“Mr. Slattery,” he said, “you are, without exception, the most fortunate man in the world. You own the most perfect yacht I have ever seen, you have no business or other cares, you have the friends who make a man happy. It is a wonderful existence.”

Grant smiled.

“Rather a lazy one, I am afraid,” he admitted.

“Laziness is the only sound philosophy of life,” Blunn insisted. “If you have no need to work for yourself, why do it? If you spend your time working for others, you meet with nothing but ingratitude. I grudge the time I have to give to the management of my own affairs, but I am always deeply grateful that I was never tempted to dabble in politics. I am training up young men, and in five years’ time I shall be free from all cares. When that time comes, I shall be like a lizard in the sun of good fortune. I will never write a letter and seldom read a newspaper.”

“I thought that all Germans were politicians by instinct, from their cradles upwards,” Lord Yeovil remarked, smiling.

“Not in these days,” Blunn replied, helping himself to his third cake. “My father, of course, was a rabid politician, but he lived in terrible times. A prosperous Germany is so much to the good, of course, but her sons naturally lack the inspiration of what used to be known as patriotism. The fact of it is,” he went on, “that industrially Germany............