e, Jack and Frank were to call at the lawyers' office in
Lincoln's Inn Fields, and leave a message, as the office would be closed
of course, immediately after the wanderer had been dressed properly in
ready-made clothes. Then they would catch the early afternoon train and
get to Merefield that night. The funeral could not possibly take place
for several days: there would have to be an inquest.

Then they read over the account of the smash in the _Star_
newspaper--special edition. It seemed to have been nobody's fault. The
brake had refused to act going down a steep hill; they had run into a
wall; the chauffeur had been thrown clean over it; the two passengers
had been pinned under the car. Lord Talgarth was dead at once; Archie
had died five minutes after being taken out.

So they all talked at once in low voices, but in the obvious excitement
of relief. It was an extraordinary pleasure to them--now that they
looked at it in the sanity conferred by food and warmth--to reflect that
Frank was within a quarter of a mile of them--certainly in dreary
surroundings; but it was for the last time. To-morrow would see him
restored to ordinary life, his delusions and vagaries plucked from him
by irresistible circumstance, and the future in his hands.

* * * * *

Midnight still found them talking--alert and cheerful; but a little
silence fell as they heard the chiming of bells.

"Christmas Day, by George!" said the clergyman. "Merry Christmas!"

They shook hands, smiling shamefacedly, as is the custom of Englishmen.

"And to think of old Frank--" mused Jack half aloud. "I told you,
Guiseley, about his coming to me in the autumn?" (He had been thinking a
great deal about that visit lately, and about what Frank had told him of
himself--the idea he had of Something going on behind the scenes in
which he had passively to take his part; his remark on how pleasant it
must be to be a squire. Well, the play had come to an end, it seemed;
now there followed the life of a squire indeed. It was curious to think
that Frank was, actually at this moment, Lord Talgarth!)

Dick nodded his head, smiling to himself in his beard. Somehow or
another the turn things had taken had submerged in him for the present
the consciousness of the tragedy up at Merefield, and his own private
griefs, and the memory of Jenny.

Jack told it all again briefly. He piled it on about the Major and his
extreme repulsiveness, and th