urned the key, and lo, with a
click, here was an entirely changed, immensely complicated, intensely
poignant situation. But our excitable old friend was an Englishwoman:
dissimulation would be her second nature; you could trust her to pull
the wool over your eyes with a fleet and practised hand. Instinctively,
furthermore, she would seek to extract from such a situation all the fun
it promised. Taken off her guard, for the span of ten heart-beats she
sat up straight and stared; but with the eleventh her attitude relaxed.
She had regained her outward nonchalance, and resolved upon her system
of fence.

"Ah," she said, on a tone judiciously compounded of feminine artlessness
and of forthright British candour, and with a play of the eyebrows that
attributed her momentary suscitation to the workings of memory, "of
course--Blanchemain. The Sussex Blanchemains. I expect there's only one
family of the name?"

"I've never heard of another," assented the young man.

"The Ventmere Blanchemains," she pursued pensively. "Lord Blanchemain of
Ventmere is your titled head?"

"Exactly," said he.

"I knew the late Lord Blanchemain--I knew him fairly well," she
mentioned, always with a certain pensiveness.

"Oh--?" said he, politely interested.

"Yes," said she. "But I've never met his successor. The two were not, I
believe, on speaking terms. Of course,"--and her forthright British
candour carried her trippingly over the delicate ground,--"it's common
knowledge that the family is divided against itself--hostile branches--a
Protestant branch and a Catholic. The present lord, if I've got it
right, is a Catholic, and the late lord's distant cousin?"

"You've got it quite right," the young man assured her, with a nod, and
a little laugh. "They had the same great-great-grandfather. The last
few lords have been Protestants, but in our branch the family have never
forsaken the old religion."

"I know," said she. "And wasn't it--I've heard the story, but I'm a bit
hazy about it--wasn't it owing to your--is 'recusancy' the word?--that
you lost the title? Wasn't there some sort of sharp practice at your
expense in the last century?"

The young man had another little laugh.

"Oh, nothing," he answered, "that wasn't very much the fashion. The late
lord's great-grandfather denounced his elder brother as a Papist and a
Jacobite--nothing more than that. It was after the 'Forty-five. So the
cadet took the title and estates. But with the d