for motor drives
alone with Mr. Callamay; and of old Lord Moleyn one wondered why he
wasn't living in gilded exile on the island of Capri among the other
distinguished persons who, for one reason or another, find it impossible
to live in England. They were talking to Anne, laughing, the one
profoundly, the other hootingly.

A black silk balloon towing a black-and-white striped parachute proved
to be old Mrs. Budge from the big house on the other side of the valley.
She stood low on the ground, and the spikes of her black-and-white
sunshade menaced the eyes of Priscilla Wimbush, who towered over her--a
massive figure dressed in purple and topped with a queenly toque on
which the nodding black plumes recalled the splendours of a first-class
Parisian funeral.

Denis peeped at them discreetly from the window of the morning-room.
His eyes were suddenly become innocent, childlike, unprejudiced. They
seemed, these people, inconceivably fantastic. And yet they really
existed, they functioned by themselves, they were conscious, they
had minds. Moreover, he was like them. Could one believe it? But the
evidence of the red notebook was conclusive.

It would have been polite to go and say, "How d'you do?" But at the
moment Denis did not want to talk, could not have talked. His soul was a
tenuous, tremulous, pale membrane. He would keep its sensibility intact
and virgin as long as he could. Cautiously he crept out by a side
door and made his way down towards the park. His soul fluttered as he
approached the noise and movement of the fair. He paused for a moment on
the brink, then stepped in and was engulfed.

Hundreds of people, each with his own private face and all of them real,
separate, alive: the thought was disquieting. He paid twopence and saw
the Tatooed Woman; twopence more, the Largest Rat in the World. From the
home of the Rat he emerged just in time to see a hydrogen-filled balloon
break loose for home. A child howled up after it; but calmly, a perfect
sphere of flushed opal, it mounted, mounted. Denis followed it with his
eyes until it became lost in the blinding sunlight. If he could but send
his soul to follow it!...

He sighed, stuck his steward's rosette in his buttonhole, and started to
push his way, aimlessly but officially, through the crowd.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Mr. Scogan had been accommodated in a little canvas hut. Dressed in a
black skirt and a red bodice, with a yellow-and-red bandana handkerchief