he knew just what to do and did it without being told; and when he
spoke it was only because he had been spoken to or commissioned to convey
a message.

Victor watched him from every angle, overt and covert, but had his trouble
for his pains; Nogam, observed in a mirror, when Victor's back was turned,
went about his business with no more betrayal of personal feeling or
independent mentality than when waiting upon his master face to face.
Victor could have kicked him for sheer resentment of his pattern virtues.
When all was said and done, it _was_ damned irritating. . . .

In the servants' hall he religiously kept his ears open and his mouth shut.
And, listening, he learned. For some things said in his hearing were
distinctly not pretty, and made one wonder if Prince Victor's deep-rooted
confidence in an England mortally cankered with social discontent were not
grounded in a surprising familiarity with backstairs morale. Other
observations, again, were merely ribald, some were humorous, while all were
enlightening.

Not a few of the company had seen domestic service in great houses before
the war; they knew what was what and--more to the point--what wasn't. One
gathered that this pretentious country home fell within the latter
classification. Here, it was stated, anybody could buy his way into favour:
the more bounding the bounder the brighter his chances of success at
Frampton Court.

War, the ironic, had caused this noble property to pass into the keeping of
a distant and degenerate branch of an old and honoured house; and its
present lord and lady, having failed to win the social welcome they had
counted on too confidently, were doing their silly, shabby best to squander
a princely fortune and dedicate a great name to lasting disrepute by
fraternizing with a motley riffraff of profiteering nouveaux riches. Other
than bad manners and worse morals, the one genuine thing in the whole
establishment was, it seemed, the historic collection of family jewels.

This information explained away much of Nogam's perplexity on one score.

After dinner, when the house party began to settle into its stride, he made
occasion, aping the other servants, to peep in at a door of the great
ballroom, where an impromptu dance had been organized; and was rewarded by
sight of the Princess Sofia circling the floor in the arms of a boldly
good-looking young man whose taste was as poor in flirtation as in
self-adornment.

To Nogam the you