g none. You have been most correct and courteous."

Before she went away Mr. Townlinson felt that he had been greatly
enlightened as to what a young lady might know and be. She gave him
singularly clear details as to what was proposed. There was so much to
be done that he found himself opening his eyes slightly once or twice.
But, of course, if Mr. Vanderpoel was prepared to spend money in
a lavish manner, it was all to the good so far as the estate was
concerned. They were stupendous, these people, and after all the heir
was his grandson. And how striking it was that with all this power and
readiness to use it, was evidently combined, even in this beautiful
young person, the clearest business sense of the situation. What was
done would be for the comfort of Lady Anstruthers and the future of her
son. Sir Nigel, being unable to sell either house or lands, could not
undo it.

When Mr. Townlinson accompanied his visitor to her carriage with
dignified politeness he felt somewhat like an elderly solicitor who had
found himself drawn into the atmosphere of a sort of intensely modern
fairy tale. He saw two of his under clerks, with the impropriety of
middle-class youth, looking out of an office window at the dark blue
brougham and the tall young lady, whose beauty bloomed in the sunshine.
He did not, on the whole, wonder at, though he deplored, the conduct
of the young men. But they, of course, saw only what they colloquially
described to each other as a "rippin' handsome girl." They knew nothing
of the interesting interview.

He himself returned to his private room in a musing mood and thought
it all over, his mind dwelling on various features of the international
situation, and more than once he said aloud:

"Most remarkable. Very remarkable, indeed."

CHAPTER XVIII

THE FIFTEENTH EARL OF MOUNT DUNSTAN

James Hubert John Fergus Saltyre--fifteenth Earl of Mount Dunstan, "Jem
Salter," as his neighbours on the Western ranches had called him, the
red-haired, second-class passenger of the Meridiana, sat in the great
library of his desolate great house, and stared fixedly through the open
window at the lovely land spread out before him. From this particular
window was to be seen one of the greatest views in England. From the
upper nurseries he had lived in as a child he had seen it every day from
morning until night, and it had seemed to his young fancy to cover all
the plains of the earth. Surely the rest of the worl