on below
the copse they came to the one vulnerable part in all the haw-haw's
length. She showed him how to take the bricks out and where to place his
feet, and pointed out how secluded from any eye the place was. Then, as
he climbed down and then up again, and looked across at her from
Wendover lands, she said a sedate good-by, and turning, went on among
the thickly growing saplings of the copse and, never looking back, was
soon out of sight.

John Derringham watched her disappear with a strange feeling of ruffled
disquietude in his heart.

CHAPTER XI

It was so warm and charming an April day that Mrs. Cricklander and some
of her friends were out of doors before luncheon, walking up and down
the broad terrace walk that flanked Wendover's southern side.

It was a Georgian house, spacious and comfortable, but not especially
beautiful. Mrs. Cricklander was a woman of enormous ability--she had a
perfect talent for discovering just the right people to work for her
pleasure and benefit, while being without a single inspiration herself.
If she engaged a professional adviser to furnish her house, and decorate
it, you could be sure he was of the best and that his services had been
measured and balanced beforehand, and that he had been generously paid
whatever he had obtained by bargaining for it, and that the agreement
was signed and every penny of the cost entered in a little book. It was
so with everything that touched her life. She had a definite idea of
what she wanted, although she did not always want the same thing for
long; but while she did, she went about getting it in a sensible,
practical way, secured it, paid for it,--and then often threw it away.

She had felt she wanted Vincent Cricklander because he belonged to one
of the old families in New York and played polo well, and, being a great
heiress though of no pretensions to birth, she wished to have an
undisputed entry into the inner circle of her own country. He fulfilled
her requirements for quite three years, and then she felt she was
"through" with America, and wanted fresh fields for her efforts. Paris
was too easy, Berlin doubtful, Vienna and Petersburg impossible to
conquer, but London would hold out everything that she could wish for.
Only, it must be the very best of London, not the part of its society
that anyone can struggle and push and pay to get into, but the real
thing. She was "quite finished" with Vincent Cricklander, too, at this
peri