Mosscrop turned the spring-lock noiselessly, and drew the door open with caressing gentleness. His eyes had intuitively prepared themselves to discern the slender form of Vestalia in the dim light of the passage. They beheld instead, with bewildered repulsion, a burly masculine bulk. Wandering upward in angry confusion from the level on which they had expected her dear face, they took in the fatuous, moon-like visage of Lord Drumpipes.

“Dear God!” groaned David, in frank abandonment to disgust.

“I came up quietly this time,” said the Earl. “You made such a row about my being noisy last night, I thought to myself, ‘Now, anything to please Davie! I’ll steal up like a mouse in list-slippers.’”

David scowled angry impatience at him. “Who the deuce cares what you do?” he demanded, roughly. “You might have marched up with a Salvation Army band, for all it matters to me.”

“Ah,” said Drumpipes, placidly pushing his way past Mosscrop through the open door. “Well, give me a drink, Davie, man, and then tell me all about it. Where may the lady be at the present moment?”

Mosscrop came in, and produced another glass with a gloomy air. He watched the Earl seat himself in the biggest chair and help himself from the decanter, and light his pipe, all in moody silence. “She’s gone away,” he said at last, coldly.

“And a good job, too!” remarked the other. “Distrust all yellow-hair, Davie! Have you been in my place and seen what that woman did? There was my Athabaska moose actually torn from the wall, and pulled to bits on the floor! It’s a matter of fifty shillings, or even more, Davie. Considering what you’d already spent on her, I call that heartless behaviour on her part. She must be a bad sort indeed to take all you would give her, and fool you to the top of your bent, and then wantonly destroy property that she knew you’d have to make good, before she took French leave. Ah, women are not given that kind of hair for nothing! You’re well out of a thankless mess, Davie.”

Mosscrop looked musingly at his friend. He smiled a little to himself, and then sighed as well. A calmer temper returned to him. “I don’t take your view of it, Archie,” he said, almost gently. “I have been as sad about it as a child who’s lost its pet, but I’m less disconsolate than I was. Some compensations occur to me—and besides, I have a letter from her. It came to-night, and from its tone——”

“Burn it, man, burn it!” the other adjured him, with eager fervour. “Drive the whole business from your mind! If you’ll give me your solemn word, Davie, not to see her again”—the Earl paused, to invest his further words with a deeper gravity—“if you’ll promise faithfully to have no more to do with her, I’ll forgive you the moose. I said fifty shillings, but I doubt your getting a good job much under three pounds. Well, then, if you say the word, I’ll pocket that loss. Hang it all, you’re my boyhood friend, and I’d go to a considerable length to save you from a dangerous entanglement of this sort. Although it was by no means an ordinary head. Man, I fair loved that moosie!”

Mosscrop’s smooth-shaven and somewhat sallow visage had gradually lost its melancholy aspect. A cheerful grin began now to play about the corners of his mouth. “Archie,” he said with an affectation of exaggerated seriousness, “a moose more or less is not worth mentioning by comparison with the situation which is about to confront you. I know the particular beast you speak of. It was not up to much. The fur was dropping out in patches on its neck, one of its eyes was loose, and the red paint on the nostrils was oxidized. You would not have got twelve-and-six for it anywhere in the world. But if it had been the choicest trophy that was ever mounted, and then its value were multiplied a hundred-fold, it would still be a waste of your time to give it a second thought. Graver matters demand your attention, Archie.”

The Earl’s countenance lengthened, and he set down his glass. He apparently did not trust himself to speak, but stared in alarmed inquiry at his friend.

“As you said a while ago,” pursued David, with vexatious deliberation, “we have been pals from boyhood. My father was your grandfather’s man of business, and was your factor till his death. You and I played together before we were breeched. We went to school together, and I spent more holidays at Skirl with you than I did at home. So I know the ins and outs of your family and its affairs practically as well as you do. I know your sisters——”

“You don’t mean that Ellen has given up her Zenana mission work in Burmah, and returned here to England?” Drumpipes interposed, with a convulsive catch in his breath.

“No; the Lady Ellen, so far as I know, is still peacefully occupied in harrowing up the domestic life of the Orient in her well-known and most effective manner.”

“Well, anything else must be a minor evil,” said the Earl, with an accent of relief. “Whichever of the rest of them it is, Davie, I tell you at the outset that I wash my hands of the business. My sisters rendered the first twenty-five years of my life a torment upon earth. They bullied me out of all peace in life as a youngster; they made my rotten marriage for me; they took my money and then blackened my character in reward; they——”

“Oh, I know all those gags by heart,” interposed Mosscrop. “They’re really very decent bodies, those sisters of yours; if they had a fault, it was in believing that they could make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But it’s not about them at all that I was speaking. The point is, Archie, that I have made the acquaintance of Mr. Laban Skinner and his extremely attractive daughter.”

The Earl took in this intelligence with ponderous slowness. He sipped at his glass in silence, and then stared for a little at his friend. “Well, what is there so alarming about that?” he demanded at last, roughening his voice in puzzled annoyance. “They’re respectable people, aren’t they? And what the deuce are you driving at, anyway?”

“Ah, if you take that tone with me, old man, I pull out of the affair at once.”

Drumpipes scowled. “What affair? How do you know there is any affair! And what business have you got being in it, if there is an affair? You’re over-officious, my friend. You take too much on yourself.”

Mosscrop laughed with tantalising enjoyment in his eyes. “Confess that you think of making a Countess of the lady.”

“Well, and what if I do?” the Earl retorted. “Damn it all, man, I haven’t to ask your leave, have I? And, come now, I put it to you straight, have you ever seen a finer woman in your life?”

David lifted his brows judicially, and held his head to one side. “Oh, I’m not saying she’s amiss—in externals,” he admitted.

“Man, she’s wonderful! Just wonderful!” cried the other. “Did you mind her walk? It is as if she’d never been outside a palace in her life. And the face, the eyes, the colour, the figure—what Queen in Europe can match them? Man, since I first laid eyes on her, I’ve not been myself at all. The thought of her bewitches me. I hardly know what I’m doing. I’ve been to-day to my tailor’s, and I gave him orders that fair took his breath away. The most expensive clothes, and even furs, I ordered with as light a heart as if it were a matter of sixpences. The man knows me from childhood, and he gazed at me as if I was clean daft. He was shaking his head to himself when I came away. Oh, I’m quite a different person, I assure you. I literally hurl money about me, nowadays.”

“You must indeed be in love,” said Moss-crop. “The father—he gives one the notion of a man of wealth.”

The Earl’s face glistened. “He’s in the Standard Oil Company!” he whispered, impressively.

This fact created an atmosphere of dignified solemnity for itself. The two men looked at each other gravely for a while, saying nothing. Then the Earl, with a contemplative air, refilled his glass.

“She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known,” he said, earnestly; “and I think she will marry me.”

“Physical beauty and Standard Oil do make an alluring combination,” remarked David philosophically; “but——”

“Oh, there are no ‘buts,’” Drum-pipes insisted. “She’s as fine in mind and temper as she is in body. I’m very particular about intellect, as you know, and I’ve studied her closely. She has a very sound brain, Davie—for a woman. But how on earth did you come to stumble upon them?”

Mosscrop did not explain. “The thing that impressed me about her, curiously enough,” he said, with tranquil discursiveness, “was her extremely democratic aversion to our ranks and hereditary titles. She and her father seem to be the most violent anti-aristocrats I ever knew.”

“Yes, that is a trifle awkward,” the Earl admitted. “I don’t think it’s more than skin-deep with the old man, but Adele—that’s her name, as beautiful as herself, isn’t it?—she’s tremendously in earnest about it. That has rather queered my pitch—I haven’t told them, you know, about the title and all that. They know me just as simple Mr. Linkhaw.”

“‘Simple’ is so precisely the word,” commented Mosscrop.

“Well, what was I to do?” the other protested in self-defence. “I was travelling under that name in Kentucky—went there to look at a big sale of thoroughbreds, you know—and met the father, and then I met the girl, and they had me to their house in the country—a magnificent place, by George—and she had so much to say against the classes here, and took such a strong position against titles and all that—why, I would have been a juggins to tell her at the start; and after, it gradually occurred to me that I wouldn’t say anything at all, but just go on and win her as plain Mr. Linkhaw. Then I could be sure I was being loved for myself alone, couldn’t I?”

“Your sentimentality is most touching,” said David; “but I fear it will cost you heavily.”

“Oh, by the way, yes,” remarked Drum-pipes, collecting his thoughts; “you said something awhile ago about there being a bother of some sort. What is it?” Then an idea occurred to him, and he lifted his head eagerly. “You haven’t gone and blabbed about me, have you—told her who I was, and all that?”

“Quite the contrary,” smiled David. “It was she who recognised me at once as the Earl of Drumpipes. It seems you showed her my picture on shipboard, and told her who I was, and all about me. Do you recall the incident?”

The Earl nodded, foolishly. “It’s my confounded imagination,” he groaned. “I’m always making an ass of myself like that. God only knows why I should have gone out of my way to invent that id............