n who
at four o'clock in the morning could have a sword driven through the
tissues in perilous proximity to the right lung, and yet, at nine
o'clock on that same night, was able to announce an unalterable
resolution to get up and dress for breakfast next day. That, of
course, was a pleasing fiction intended for Cynthia's benefit. It
served its purpose admirably. The kindly nurse displayed an unexpected
firmness in leading her to her own room, there to eat and sleep.

For Cynthia had an ordeal to face. Many things had been said in the
car during that mad rush to Folkestone, and on board the steamer which
ferried Dale and herself to Boulogne she had wrung from the taciturn
chauffeur a full, true, and particular account of Medenham, his
family, and his doings throughout as much of his life as Dale either
knew or guessed. By the time they reached Boulogne she had made up her
mind with a characteristic decision. One long telegram to her father,
another to Lord Fairholme, caused heart-burning and dismay not alone
in certain apartments of the Savoy Hotel, but in the aristocratic
aloofness of Cavendish Square and Curzon Street. As a result, two
elderly men, a younger one, in the person of the Marquis of Scarland,
and two tearful women--Lady St. Maur and Mrs. Leland--met at Charing
Cross about one o'clock in the morning to travel by special train and
steamer. Another woman telegraphed from Shropshire saying that baby
was better, and that she would follow by the first steamer on Sunday.
Mrs. Devar did not await developments. She fled, dinnerless, to some
burrow in Bayswater.

These alarums and excursions were accompanied by the ringing of
telephones and the flight of carriages back and forth through muddy
London, and Cynthia was called on to deal with a whole sheaf of
telegrams which demanded replies either to Dover or to Scarland Towers
in Shropshire.

With a man like Vanrenen at one end, however, and a woman like his
daughter at the other, it might be fairly assumed that even the most
complex skein of circumstances might be resolved from its tangle.
As a matter of curious coincidence, the vessel which carried Marigny
to England passed in mid-Channel its sister ship conveying the
grief-stricken party of relatives to France. It happened, too, that
the clouds from the Atlantic elected to hover over Britain rather
than France, and when Cynthia stood on the quay to meet the incoming
steamer, a burst of sunshine from the east gav