hoking myself with a cherry-stone. Long before this
I'd been sure of his name, but I hadn't expected to hear Lady
MacNairne's.

"Forty, and looks twenty-five."

Yes, that was a fair description of Lady MacNairne, as far as it went;
but much more might be said by her admirers, of whom I openly declared
myself one, before a good-sized audience at a country house in Scotland,
not quite a year ago.

It was merely a little flirtation, to pass the time, on both our parts.
A woman of forty who is a beauty and a flirt has no time to waste, and
Lady MacNairne is not wasteful. She was the handsomest woman at Kinloch
Towers, my cousin Dave Norman's place, and a Dutchman was a novelty to
her; so we amused ourselves for ten days, and I should have kept the
pleasantest memory of the episode if Sir Alec had not taken it into his
head to be jealous.

Poor Fleda MacNairne was whisked away before the breaking-up of the
house-party, and that is the last I have seen of her, but not the last
I've heard. Once in a while I get a letter, amusing, erratic, like
herself; and in such communications she doesn't scruple to chronicle
other flirtations which have followed hard on mine. Only a short time
before the making of this plot in a Rotterdam garden, a letter from her
gave startling news: consequently I am now in possession of knowledge
apparently denied to the nephew.

A few minutes more and the pair in the next arbor separated, the woman
departing to purchase the fittings of aunthood, the man remaining to
pay the bill. But before he had time to beckon the waiter I got up and
walked into his lair.

"Mr. Starr," I said, "I'm going to stop your game."

"The devil you are! And who are you?" answered he, first staring, then
flushing.

"My name's Rudolph Brederode," said I.

"You're a d--d eavesdropper," said he.

"You are the same kind of a fool, for thinking because your neighbor
spoke Dutch he couldn't know English. I sat still and let you go on,
because I don't mean to allow any of the persons concerned to be imposed
upon by you."

He glared at me across the table as if he could have killed me, and I
glared back at him; yet all the while I was conscious of a sneaking
kindness for the fellow, he looked so stricken--rather like an endearing
scamp of an Eton boy who has got into a horrid scrape, and is being
hauled over the coals by the Head.

"What business is it of yours?" he wanted to know.

"Lady MacNairne's a friend of mine.