you'd tumbled over a precipice!" exclaimed Sir
Samuel, with the jovial loudness that comes to men of his age from good
champagne or the rich red wines of Southern France.

Jack explained. The fair-haired young man let him finish in peace, and
then said, slowly, "Isn't your name Dane?"

"It is," replied my brother.

"Thought I knew your face," went on the other. "So you've taken to
chauffeuring as a last resort--what?"

He was intended by Providence to be good looking, but so snobbish was
his expression as he spoke, so cruelly sarcastic his voice, that he
became hideous in my eyes. A bleached skull grinning over a tall collar
could not have seemed more repulsive than the pink, healthy features of
that young man with his single eye-glass and his sneer.

Jack paid no more attention than if he had not heard, but the slight
stiffening of his face and raising of his eyebrows as he turned to Sir
Samuel, made him look supremely proud and distinguished, incomparably
more a gentleman in his dusty leather livery, than Bertie in his
well-cut evening clothes.

"I called at the railway station, and the luggage will be here before
eight to-morrow morning," he said, quietly.

"All right, all right," replied Sir Samuel, slow to understand what was
going on, but uncomfortable between the two young men. "I didn't know
that you were acquainted with my stepson, Dane."

"It was scarcely an acquaintance, sir," said the chauffeur. "And I
wasn't aware that Mr. Stokes was your stepson."

"If you had been, you jolly well wouldn't have taken the
engagement--what?" remarked Bertie, with a hateful laugh.

This time Jack condescended to look at him; from the head down, from the
feet up. "Really," he said, after an instant's reflection, "it wouldn't
have been fair to Sir Samuel to feel a prejudice on account of the
relationship. If one of the servants would kindly show me the garage--"

CHAPTER XXVI

If it hadn't been for the hope of seeing Jack again, I should have said
that I wanted nothing to eat, when I was asked; but I thought that he
might come to the servants' dining-room, if only because he would expect
to find me there; and I was right: he came.

"What an imbroglio!" I whispered, as he joined me at the table, where
hot soup and cold chicken were set forth.

"Not at all," said he, cheerfully. "Things are better for me than I
thought. Roquemartine didn't recognize me, I'm sure, for if he had, he
would have said so. He i