nd he said in a voice that the
financier knew was strained,

"That is awfully good of you. I shall have to have it inserted in the
family tree--some day. But now I think I shall turn in. I want to have
my eye rested, and be as fit as a fiddle for the shoot. I have had a
tiring week."

And Francis Markrute came out with him into the passage and up to the
first floor, and when they got so far they heard the notes of the
_Chanson Triste_ being played again from Zara's sitting-room. She had
not gone to bed, then, it seemed!

"Good God!" said Tristram. "I don't know why, but I wish to heaven she
would not play that tune."

And the two men looked at one another with some uneasy wonder in their
eyes.

"Go on and take her to bed," the financier suggested. "Perhaps she does
not like being left so long alone."

Tristram went upstairs with a bitter laugh to himself.

He did not go near the sitting-room; he went straight into the room
which had been allotted to himself: and a savage sense of humiliation
and impotent rage convulsed him.

The next day, the express which would stop for them at Tylling Green,
the little station for Montfitchet, started at two o'clock, and the
financier had given orders to have an early lunch at twelve before they
left. He, himself, went off to the City for half an hour to read his
letters, at ten o'clock, and was surprised when he asked Turner if Lord
and Lady Tancred had break-fasted to hear that her ladyship had gone out
at half-past nine o'clock and that his lordship had given orders to his
valet not to disturb him, in his lordship's room--and here Turner
coughed--until half-past ten.

"See that they have everything they want," his master said, and then
went out. But when he was in his electric brougham, gliding eastwards,
he frowned to himself.

"The proud, little minx! So she has insisted upon keeping to the
business bargain up till now, has she!" he thought. "If it goes on we
shall have to make her jealous. That would be an infallible remedy for
her caprice."

But Zara was not concerned with such things at all for the moment. She
was waiting anxiously for Mimo at their trysting-place, the mausoleum of
Halicarnassus in the British Museum, and he was late. He would have the
last news of Mirko. No reply had awaited her to her telegram to Mrs.
Morley from Paris, and it had been too late to wire again last night.
And Mrs. Morley must have got the telegram, because Mimo had got his.

S