ust caught sight of Lady
Somebody-or-other at the window of a house in Hove, and hoped that her
ladyship's eyes were sufficiently good to distinguish at least one
occupant of the car.

"Yes; and Sir Christopher Wren mixed beams of oak with the stonework
of his pillars, too. It gave them strength, he believed, though
Michael Angelo had probably never heard of such a thing."

"You don't say so."

The other woman had traveled far on similar conversational counters.
They would have failed with Cynthia, but the girl had opened the map,
and talk lagged for the moment.

Leaving the coast at Shoreham, Medenham turned the car northward at
Bramber, with its stone-roofed cottages gilded with lichen, its tiny
gardens gay with flowers, and the ruins of its twelfth-century castle
frowning from the crest of an elm-clothed hill. Two miles to the
northwest they came upon ancient Steyning, now a sleepy country town,
but of greater importance than Bath or Birmingham or Southampton in
the days of the Confessor, and redolent of the past by reason of its
church, with an early Norman chancel, its houses bearing stone
moldings and window mullions of the Elizabethan period, and its quaint
street names, such as Dog Lane, Sheep-pen Street, and Chantry Green,
where two martyrs were burnt.

Thence the way lay through the leafy wonderland of West Sussex, when
the Mercury crept softly through Midhurst and Petersfield into
Hampshire, and so to Winchester, where Cynthia, enraptured with the
cathedral, used up a whole reel of films, and bought some curios
carved out of oak imbedded in the walls when the Conqueror held
England in his firm grip.

They lunched at a genuine old coaching-house in the main street, and
Medenham persuaded the girl to turn aside from Salisbury in order to
pass through the heart of the New Forest. She sat with him in front
then, and their talk dealt more with the magnificent scenery than with
personal matters until they reached Ringwood, where they halted for
tea.

Before alighting at the inn there she asked him where he meant to stay
in Bournemouth. He answered the one question by another.

"You put up at the Bath Hotel, I think?" he said.

"Yes. Someone told me it was more like a Florentine picture gallery
than a hotel. Is that true?"

"I have not been to Florence, but the picture gallery notion is all
right. When I was a youngster I came here often, and my--my people
always--well, you see----"

He nibbled his m