s cleverer and shrewder than his opponents. His
name might be coupled with that of a pretty actress, and people would
only smile knowingly. But let a hint of his betrayal of Etta Stampa
and its attendant circumstances reach the ears of those who hated him,
and he would sink forthwith into the slough of rich parvenus who eke
out their lives in vain efforts to enter the closely guarded circle
from which he had been expelled.

If that was the only danger, he might meet and vanquish it. The
unscrupulous use of money, backed up by the law of libel, can do a
great deal to still the public conscience. There was another, more
subtle and heart searching.

He was genuinely in love with Helen Wynton. He had reached an age when
position and power were more gratifying than mere gilded Bohemianism.
He could enter Parliament either by way of Palace Yard or through
the portals of the Upper House. He owned estates in Scotland and the
home counties, and his Park Lane mansion figured already in the
address books of half the peerage. It pleased him to think that in
placing a charming and gracious woman like Helen at the head of his
household, she would look to him as the lodestar of her existence,
and not tolerate him with the well-bred hauteur of one of the many
aristocratic young women who were ready enough to marry him, but who,
in their heart of hearts, despised him. He had deliberately avoided
that sort of matrimonial blunder. It promised more than it fulfilled.
He refused to wed a woman who deemed her social rank dearly bartered
for his money.

Yet, before ever the question arose, he knew quite well that this
girl whom he had chosen--the poorly paid secretary of some harmless
enthusiast, the strangely selected correspondent of an insignificant
journal--would spurn him with scorn if she heard the story Stampa
might tell of his lost daughter. That was the wildest absurdity in the
mad jumble of events which brought him here face to face with a broken
and frayed old man,--one whom he had never seen before the previous
day. It was of a piece with this fantasy that he should be standing
ankle deep in snow under the brilliant sun of August, and in risk, if
not in fear, of his life within two hundred yards of a crowded hotel
and a placid Swiss village.

His usually well ordered brain rebelled against these manifest
incongruities. His passion subsided almost as quickly as it had
arisen. He moistened his cold lips with his tongue, and the