re the last of all the luxuries then appurtenant to a noble
lineage, have sadly thinned the splendid grove. Nor is the domain void
of historic interest. Here was the scene of the crowning festivity of
the pleasure-loving Victorian era when the nobility of the United
Kingdom gathered to listen to a masque by Sir William Gilbert and Sir
Arthur Sullivan in aid of a fund to erect a statue to the memory of one
John Brown, a henchman of the sovereign.

But what boots in this age of earnest activity more than a trivial
reference to the selfish splendor of a superstitious past? To-day is
to-day, and the nails on the coffin-lid of the last Hanoverian would
scarcely be of silver, so many hungry mouths are to be fed.

Geoffrey Ripon on the morning following his reflections was sauntering
along the gravel path which bordered the cliff. He was reading the
half-penny morning paper, in which he had just come upon a paragraph
describing the discovery by the police of a batch of infernal machines
supposed to have been sent over from America by friends of the
Royalists. Among the emissaries captured he read the name of Cedric
Ruskin, an old schoolfellow and great-grandson to an art critic of that
surname who flourished in former days by force of his own specific
gravity. Pained at the intelligence, he sighed heavily, and was on the
point of sitting down upon a rustic bench close at hand when a
melodious, gladsome voice hallooing his name broke in upon his
meditation. He looked up and perceived Miss Maggie Windsor skipping down
the lawn with charming unconventionality.

"Lord Brompton, Lord Brompton."

He raised his hat and stood waiting for the girl, whose motions were
marvellously graceful, especially if her large and vigorous physique be
considered. No sylph could have glided with less awkwardness, and yet a
spindle more closely resembles the bole of a giant oak than Maggie
Windsor the frail damsels who bent beneath the keen blasts of New
England a hundred years ago. Her countenance disclosed all the sprightly
intelligence which her great-grandmother may have possessed, but her
glowing cheeks and bright blue eyes told of a constitution against which
nervous prostration fulminated in vain. Nor were the bang or bangle of a
former generation visible in her composition. But here a deceptive
phrase deserves an explanation. "Composition" is an epithet which, least
of all, is applicable. Miss Windsor's perfections of whatever kind were
wh