rles,' she said very quietly. 'I will see what can
be done about Mr Clott, and whatever happens I will see that you are
not harmed.... If you like, you can dine with Verschoyle and me
to-night. You can come home with me now, while I dress. I am to meet
him at the Carlton and then we are going on to the Opera.'

'Does Verschoyle know?'

'He knows that you are you and that I am I--that is all he cares
about... He is a good man. If people must have too much money, he is
the right man to have it. He would never let a man down for want of
money--if the man was worth it.'

'Ah!' said Charles, reassured. This was like the old Clara speaking,
but with more assurance, a more certain knowledge and less bewildering
intuition and guess-work.

X

THE ENGLISH LAKES

A few weeks later, with Verschoyle and a poor relation of his, a Miss
Vibart Withers, for chaperone, Clara left London in a 60 h.p. Fiat,
which voraciously ate up the Bath Road at the rate of a mile every
minute and a half.... It was good to be out of the thick heat of
London, invaded by foreigners and provincials and turned into a city of
pleasure and summer-frocks, so that its normal life was submerged, its
character hidden. The town became as lazy and drowsy a spectacle as a
field of poppies over which danced gay and brilliant butterflies. Very
sweet was it then to turn away from it, and all that was happening in
it, to the sweet air and to fly along between green fields and
orchards, through little towns, at intervals to cross the Thames and to
feel that with each crossing London lay so much farther away. Henley,
Oxford, Lechlade, and the Cotswolds--that was the first day, and,
breathing the clover-scented air, gazing over the blue plains to the
humpy hills of Malvern, Clara flung back her head and laughed in
glee.... How wonderful in one day to shake free of everything, to
leave behind all trammels!

'No one need have any troubles now,' she said, with the bewitching
smile that made all her discoveries so entrancing. 'When people get
tied up in knots, they can just get into a car and go away. The world
is big enough for everybody.'

'But people love their troubles,' replied Verschoyle. 'I have been
looking for trouble all my life, but I can't find it. That's my
trouble.'

'Everybody ought to be happy,' she said.

'In their own way. Most people are very happy with their troubles.
They will take far more trouble over them than they