nted."

Miranda bubbled into little sympathetic explosions.

"Oh, Millie, I'll stay, of course. These boys can go. But Joan will want
some one."

Millie, however, would not hear of it.

"You're a brick, Miranda. But I have ordered the car for you all
immediately after luncheon. Joan's in bed, and wants to see no one. She
seems heartbroken. She will say nothing. I can't understand her."

There was only one at Rackham Park who did, and to him Millie Splay
turned instinctively.

"I should like you to stay, if you will put up with us. I think
Chichester feels at a loss, and he likes you very much."

"Of course I'll stay," replied Hillyard.

Mr. Albany Todd drifted away to the more congenial atmosphere of a
dowager duchess's dower-house in the Highlands, where it is to be hoped
that his conversational qualities were more brilliantly displayed than
in the irreverent gaiety of Rackham. Millie Splay meant to keep Harry
Luttrell too. She hoped against hope. This was the man for her Joan, and
whether he was wasting his leave miserably in that melancholy house
troubled her not one jot.

"It would be so welcome to me if you would put off your departure," she
said. "I am sure there is some dreadful misunderstanding."

Luttrell consented willingly to stay, and they went into the library,
where Sir Chichester was brooding over the catastrophe with his head in
his hands and the copy of the _Harpoon_ on the floor beside him.

"No, I can't make head or tail of it," he said, and Harper the butler
came softly into the room, closing the door from the hall.

"There's a reporter from the _West Sussex Advertiser_, sir, asking to
see you," he said, and Sir Chichester raised his head, like an old
hunter which hears a pack of hounds giving tongue in the distance.

"Where is he?"

"In the hall, sir."

The baronet's head sank again between his shoulders.

"Tell him that I can't see him," he said in a dull voice.

The butler was the only man in the room who could hear that
pronouncement with an unmoved face, and he owed his imperturbability
merely to professional pride. Indeed, it was almost unthinkable that a
couple of hours could produce so vast a revolution in a man. Here was a
reporter who had come, without being asked, to interview Sir Chichester
Splay, and the baronet would not see him! The incongruity struck Sir
Chichester himself.

"Perhaps it will seem rather impolite, eh, Luttrell? Rather hard
treatment on a man who