utes of reviving consciousness, that he
was a hopelessly ruined and discredited man; the illusion of disaster
had been, indeed, so complete and vivid that, even now, more than an
hour later, he had not shaken off its effects.

He applied his mental energies, as he strolled along the gravel paths,
to the task of reassuring himself. There were still elements of chance
in the game, of course, but it was easy enough, here in the daylight,
to demonstrate that they had been cut down to a minimum--that it was
nonsense to borrow trouble about them. He reviewed the situation in
painstaking detail, and at every point it was all right, or as nearly
all right as any human business could be. He scolded himself sharply for
this foolish susceptibility to the intimidation of nightmares. "Look at
Plowden!" he bade his dolorous spirit. "See how easy he takes things."

It was undeniable that Lord Plowden took things very easily indeed.
He had talked with eloquence and feeling about the miseries and
humiliations of a peerage inadequately endowed with money, but no traces
of his sufferings were visible to Thorpe's observant eye. The nobleman
himself looked the very image of contented prosperity--handsome,
buoyant, light-hearted, and, withal, the best-groomed man in London.
And this ancestral home of his--or of his mother's, since he seemed to
insist upon the distinction--where were its signs of a stinted income?
The place was overrun with servants. There was a horse which covered a
distance of something like two miles in eight minutes. Inside and out,
Hadlow House suggested nothing but assured plenty. Yet its master told
the most unvarying tales of poverty, and no doubt they were in one sense
true. What he wished to fix his mind upon, and to draw strength for
himself from, was the gay courage with which these Plowdens behaved as
if they were rich.

The grounds at the front of the house, hemmed in by high hedges and
trees from what seemed to be a public road beyond, were fairly spacious,
but the sleek decorum of their arrangement, while it pleased him, was
scarcely interesting. He liked better to study the house itself, which
in the daylight revealed itself as his ideal of what a historic English
country-house of the minor class should be.

There had been a period in his youth when architecture had attracted him
greatly as offering a congenial and lucrative career. Not much remained
to him now of the classifications and phraseology which