ith, and was dreadfully
wounded in some frontier fight in India when he was very young. He
nearly lost the use of his left arm, and gave up the army; but he got
the Victoria Cross. Ellaline didn't say a word about that. Maybe she
doesn't know. After I'd read his "dossier" in the paper, I couldn't
resist asking him at lunch what he had done to deserve the V. C.

"Nothing to deserve it," he answered, looking surprised.

"To get it, then?" I twisted my question round.

"Oh, I don't know--almost forget. Pulled some silly ass out of a hole, I
believe," said he.

That's what you get for asking this sort of Englishman questions about
his past. I thought it was only widows with auburn hair you mustn't talk
to about their pasts.

"A grateful Government" (according to the _Morning Post_) "sent young
Pendragon, at the age of twenty-five, to East Bengal, as private
secretary to Sir John Hurley, who was lieutenant-governor at that time";
and it's an ill Governor, so to speak, who blows no one any good. Sir
John's liver was so tired of Bengal, that he had to take it away, and
Lieutenant Pendragon (as he was then) looked after things till another
man could arrive. He looked after them so brilliantly, that when the
next lieutenant-governor did something silly, and was asked to resign,
our incipient Sir Lionel was invited to take on the job. He was only
thirty, and so he has been lieutenant-governor for ten years. Now he's
going to see whether he likes being a baronet better, and having castles
and motor-cars. All the papers I saw praised him tremendously, and said
that in a crisis which might have been disastrous he had averted a
catastrophe by his remarkable strength of character and presence of
mind. I suppose that was the time when the other papers accused him of
abominable cruelties. I wonder which was right? Perhaps I shall be able
to judge, sooner or later, if I watch at the loopholes of his character
like a cat watching for a mouse to come out for a walk.

As for money, if one can believe newspapers, he has plenty without
shaking pennies from the slot of Ellaline Lethbridge's bank, and was
fairly well off even before he came in for his title or his castle.
However, as a very young man, he may have been poor--about the time he
went into guardianship.

By the way, the left arm seems all right now. Anyhow, he uses it as arms
are meant to be used, so far as I can see, so evidently it improved with
time.

The papers tell ab