nd----" he laughed as he flicked the ash from
his cigar--"the back of her head and shoulders looked handsome."

"The American young woman is at present a factor which is without doubt
to be counted with," Lord Dunholm put the matter without lightness. "Any
young woman is a factor, but the American young woman just now--just
now----" He paused a moment as though considering. "It did not seem at
all necessary to count with them at first, when they began to appear
among us. They were generally curiously exotic, funny little creatures
with odd manners and voices. They were often most amusing, and one liked
to hear them chatter and see the airy lightness with which they took
superfluous, and sometimes unsuperfluous, conventions, as a hunter takes
a five-barred gate. But it never occurred to us to marry them. We did
not take them seriously enough. But we began to marry them--we began to
marry them, my good fellow!"

The final words broke forth with such a suggestion of sudden anxiety
that, in spite of himself, Westholt laughed involuntarily, and his
father, turning to look at him, laughed also. But he recovered his
seriousness.

"It was all rather a muddle at first," he went on. "Things were not
fairly done, and certain bad lots looked on it as a paying scheme on the
one side, while it was a matter of silly, little ambitions on the other.
But that it is an extraordinary country there is no sane denying--huge,
fabulously resourceful in every way--area, variety of climate, wealth of
minerals, products of all sorts, soil to grow anything, and sun and rain
enough to give each thing what it needs; last, or rather first, a people
who, considered as a nation, are in the riot of youth, and who began by
being English--which we Englishmen have an innocent belief is the one
method of 'owning the earth.' That figure of speech is an Americanism I
carefully committed to memory. Well, after all, look at the map--look at
the map! There we are."

They had frequently discussed together the question of the development
of international relations. Lord Dunholm, a man of far-reaching and
clear logic, had realised that the oddly unaccentuated growth of
intercourse between the two countries might be a subject to be reflected
on without lightness.

"The habit we have of regarding America and Americans as rather a joke,"
he had once said, "has a sort of parallel in the condescendingly amiable
amusement of a parent at the precocity or whimsicalnes