and his face was grim
beneath the tan.

"But you were not driving it," said the other.

"A chap named Dale was in charge then."

"Oh, is that it? You've brought two ladies here just now?"

"Yes."

"Good! My guv'nor's on the lookout for 'em. He didn't tell me so, but
he made sure they hadn't passed this way when we turned up."

"And when was that?" asked Medenham, feeling unaccountably sick at
heart.

"Soon after lunch. Ran here from Bristol. There's a bad bit of road
over the Mendips, but the rest is fine. I s'pose we'll all be hiking
back there to-night?"

"Most probably," agreed Medenham, who said least when he was most
disturbed; at that moment he could cheerfully have wrung Count Edouard
Marigny's neck.

CHAPTER V

A FLURRY ON THE MENDIPS

It is a contrariety of human nature that men devoted to venturesome
forms of sport should often be tender-hearted as children. Lord
Medenham, who had done some slaying in his time, once risked his life
to save a favorite horse from a Ganges quicksand, and his right arm
still bore the furrows plowed in it by claws that would have torn his
spaniel to pieces in a Kashmir gully had he not thrust the empty
barrels of a .450 Express rifle down the throat of an enraged bear.
In each case, a moment's delay to secure his own safety meant the
sacrifice of a friend, but safety won at such a price would have
galled him worse than the spinning of a coin with death.

Wholly apart from considerations that he was strangely unwilling
to acknowledge, even to his own heart, he now resented Marigny's
cold-blooded pursuit of an unsuspecting girl mainly because of its
unfairness. Were Cynthia Vanrenen no more to him than the hundreds of
pretty women he would meet during a brief London season he would still
have wished to rescue her from the money-hunting gang which had
marked her down as an easy prey. But he had been vouchsafed glimpses
into her white soul. That night at Brighton, and again to-day in the
cloistered depths of the cathedral at Wells, she had admitted him to
the rare intimacy of those who commune deeply in silence.

It was not that he dared yet to think of a love confessed and
reciprocated. The prince in disguise is all very well in a fairy tale;
in England of the twentieth century he is an anachronism; and Medenham
would as soon think of shearing a limb as of profiting by the chance
that threw Cynthia in his way. Of course, a less scrupulous wooer
might have d