ther taken with the hotel----"
whereat the millionaire nodded his complete agreement--"so Mr. Fitzroy
telegraphed for a man named Dale to come to Hereford. There was some
misunderstanding, however, and Dale only arrived yesterday in the car.
He left by an early train this morning, after doing the garage work."

Simmonds, candor itself about Medenham, had said no word of the Earl
of Fairholme or of Dale. Marigny, of course, was silent as to the
Earl, since it might have ruined his last faint hope of success had
the two perplexed fathers met; Simmonds's recent outburst opposed an
effectual bar to farther questioning; so Vanrenen was free to deduce
all sorts of possibilities from the existence of yet another
villainous chauffeur.

Unhappily, he availed himself of the opportunity to the full. The fair
countryside and the good food of the March counties made little or no
appeal to him thenceforth. He pined to be in Chester, yet restrained
the impulse that urged a frenzied scurry to the Banks of the Dee, for
he was adamant in his resolve not to seem to have pursued Cynthia, but
rather to have joined her as the outcome of a mere whim after she had
met Mrs. Leland.

The Mercury arrived at Ludlow long before Vanrenen crossed the Wye
Bridge at Hereford. Medenham stopped the car at "The Feathers,"
that famous magpie among British Inns, where Cynthia admired and
photographed some excellent woodcarving, and saw an iron-studded front
door which has shut out revellers and the night on each alternate
round of the clock since 1609, if not longer.

If they hurried over luncheon they were content to dawdle in the
picturesque streets, and Cynthia was reluctant to leave the fine old
castle, in which Milton's "Masque of Comus" was first played on
Michaelmas night of 1634. At first, she yielded only to the flood of
memories pent in every American brain when the citizen of the New
World stands in one of these treasure-houses of history and feels the
passing of its dim pageants; when they stood together in the ruined
banqueting hall, Medenham gave play to his imagination, and strove to
reconstruct a scene once spread before the bright eyes of a maiden
long since dead.

"You will please regard yourself," he said, "as the Lady Alice
Egerton, daughter of the Earl of Bridgwater, Lord President of the
Marches of Wales, who, with her two brothers, was benighted in the
Forest of Heywood while riding to Ludlow to witness her father's
installatio