that I've been talking to you behind his back."

The warning was an anticlimax after Lady Lane's desperate remedy of
coming to Wimpole Street and presenting all her fears and suspicions for
the doctor's diagnosis. In a life-time of anxiety and effort she was
hardly more communicative or self-pitying than her son; and Gaisford
divined that more than ordinary compulsion had sent her to him.

"Speaking as a friend of both parties," he said, "I don't know what the
hitch is. I haven't heard that the parents are making any trouble; and,
if they did, I'm afraid naughty little Barbara would just snap her
fingers at them."

"You think she's in earnest?" asked Lady Lane doubtfully.

"I do indeed--knowing something of her; and for the first time in her
life. . . . I hope it will all come right. In the meantime, she's been
ill and her father doesn't like the way the Government's conducting the
war, so they're shaking off the dust of England for the Riviera. Eric
will have his rest, whether he likes it or not."

For the first fifteen months of the war Lord Crawleigh had carried out a
campaign, unsparing to his readers, his hearers and himself, to wake
England to a more lively realization of her perils. His position and
long record of public service secured him an undisturbed hearing as he
floundered through the potentialities of Mittel-Europa with the aid of a
lantern and pointer; and his audience was usually rewarded for its
patience when he forsook high politics and set its flesh agreeably
creeping with a peroration compounded equally of German spies and
pro-German ministers. The campaign throve in the south, but slackened in
the midlands and stopped short in the north. At the same time Lord
Crawleigh's prescriptive right to the "leader" page of all daily papers
met with a challenge from certain disrespectful sub-editors who first
mislaid him among foreign telegrams and later buried him ignominiously
in small type. It was when a thoughtful exegesis on "The War and Indian
Home Rule," extending over two columns, had been held up for three days
without acknowledgement, apology or explanation, that Lord Crawleigh
decided to teach his countrymen a sharp lesson by withdrawing to the
south of France until the spring.

Any inducement to leniency was overruled when Barbara succumbed to an
attack of pleurisy. As soon as she was fit to move, he ordered his villa
to be made ready, set the dismantling of his London house in hand,
closed