r the undeserving. I've known Hylda since she
was ten, and I've known him since the minute he came into the world, and
I've got the measure of both. She is the finest essence the middle class
can distil, and he, oh, he's paraffin-vin ordinaire, if you like it
better, a selfish, calculating adventurer!"

Lord Windlehurst chuckled mordantly. "Adventurer! That's what they
called me--with more reason. I spotted him as soon as he spoke in the
House. There was devilry in him, and unscrupulousness, as you say; but,
I confess, I thought it would give way to the more profitable habit of
integrity, and that some cause would seize him, make him sincere and
mistaken, and give him a few falls. But in that he was more original
than I thought. He is superior to convictions. You don't think he
married yonder Queen of Hearts from conviction, do you?"

He nodded towards a corner where Hylda, under a great palm, and backed
by a bank of flowers, stood surrounded by a group of people palpably
amused and interested; for she had a reputation for wit--a wit that
never hurt, and irony that was only whimsical.

"No, there you are wrong," the Duchess answered. "He married from
conviction, if ever a man did. Look at her beauty, look at her fortune,
listen to her tongue. Don't you think conviction was easy?"

Lord Windlehurst looked at Hylda approvingly. She has the real
gift--little information, but much knowledge, the primary gift of public
life. "Information is full of traps; knowledge avoids them, it
reads men; and politics is men--and foreign affairs, perhaps! She is
remarkable. I've made some hay in the political world, not so much as
the babblers think, but I hadn't her ability at twenty-five."

"Why didn't she see through Eglington?"

"My dear Betty, he didn't give her time. He carried her off her feet.
You know how he can talk."

"That's the trouble. She was clever, and liked a clever man, and he--!"

"Quite so. He'd disprove his own honest parentage, if it would help him
on--as you say."

"I didn't say it. Now don't repeat that as from me. I'm not clever
enough to think of such things. But that Eglington lot--I knew his
father and his grandfather. Old Broadbrim they called his grandfather
after he turned Quaker, and he didn't do that till he had had his
fling, so my father used to say. And Old Broadbrim's father was called
I-want-to-know. He was always poking his nose into things, and playing
at being a chemist-like this one and