e me pleasure."

"He certainly has in some ways charming manners," Philip went on more
slowly. "He manages to impress one. If he's a madman, which I rather
more than half suspect, it's at least a gentlemanly form of madness."

"His manners are more than merely charming," Frida answered, quite
enthusiastic, for she had taken a great fancy at first sight to the
mysterious stranger. "They've such absolute freedom. That's what strikes
me most in them. They're like the best English aristocratic manners,
without the insolence; or the freest American manners, without the
roughness. He's extremely distinguished. And, oh, isn't he handsome!"

"He IS good-looking," Philip assented grudgingly. Philip owned a
looking-glass, and was therefore accustomed to a very high standard of
manly beauty.

As for Robert Monteith, he smiled the grim smile of the wholly
unfascinated. He was a dour business man of Scotch descent, who had made
his money in palm-oil in the City of London; and having married Frida
as a remarkably fine woman, with a splendid figure, to preside at his
table, he had very small sympathy with what he considered her high-flown
fads and nonsensical fancies. He had seen but little of the stranger,
too, having come in from his weekly stroll, or tour of inspection, round
the garden and stables, just as they were on the very point of starting
for St. Barnabas: and his opinion of the man was in no way enhanced by
Frida's enthusiasm. "As far as I'm concerned," he said, with his slow
Scotch drawl, inherited from his father (for though London-born and
bred, he was still in all essentials a pure Caledonian)--"As far as I'm
concerned, I haven't the slightest doubt but the man's a swindler. I
wonder at you, Frida, that you should leave him alone in the house just
now, with all that silver. I stepped round before I left, and warned
Martha privately not to move from the hall till the fellow was gone, and
to call up cook and James if he tried to get out of the house with any
of our property. But you never seemed to suspect him. And to supply
him with a bag, too, to carry it all off in! Well, women are reckless!
Hullo, there, policeman;--stop, Price, one moment;--I wish you'd keep an
eye on my house this morning. There's a man in there I don't half like
the look of. When he drives away in a cab that my boy's going to call
for him, just see where he stops, and take care he hasn't got anything
my servants don't know about."

In the dra