very man's fancy."

There was a burr of the instrument and then silence. Sir Timothy
carefully replaced the receiver, paused on his way out of the room to
smell a great bowl of lavender, and passed back into the garden.

"More applicants for invitations?" Lady Cynthia enquired lazily.

Her host smiled.

"Not exactly! Although," he added, "as a matter of fact my party would
have been perhaps a little more complete with the presence of the person
to whom I have been speaking."

Lady Cynthia pointed to the stream, down which the punt was slowly
drifting. The moon had gone behind a cloud, and Francis' figure, as he
stood there, was undefined and ghostly. A thought seemed to flash into
her mind. She leaned forward.

"Once," she said, "he told me that he was your enemy."

"The term is a little melodramatic," Sir Timothy protested. "We look
at certain things from opposite points of view. You see, my prospective
son-in-law, if ever he becomes that, represents the law--the Law with a
capital 'L'--which recognises no human errors or weaknesses, and judges
crime out of the musty books of the law-givers of old. He makes of the
law a mechanical thing which can neither bend nor give, and he judges
humanity from the same standpoint. Yet at heart he is a good fellow and
I like him."

"And you?"

"My weakness lies the other way," he confessed, "and my sympathy is with
those who do not fear to make their own laws."

She held out her hand, white and spectral in the momentary gloom. At the
other end of the lawn, Francis and Margaret were disembarking from the
punt.

"Does it sound too shockingly obvious," she murmured, "if I say that I
want to make you my law?"

CHAPTER XXXIII

It would have puzzled anybody, except, perhaps, Lady Cynthia herself, to
have detected the slightest alteration in Sir Timothy's demeanour during
the following day, when he made fitful appearances at The Sanctuary, or
at the dinner which was served a little earlier than usual, before his
final departure for the scene of the festivities. Once he paused in the
act of helping himself to some dish and listened for a moment to the
sound of voices in the hall, and when a taxicab drove up he set down his
glass and again betrayed some interest.

"The maid with my frock, thank heavens!" Lady Cynthia announced,
glancing out of the window. "My last anxiety is removed. I am looking
forward now to a wonderful night."

"You may very easily be disappoin