rget these incidents of his eager and impetuous youth.
Yet somehow he could not. Within the last few days his conscience had
begun to gnaw him, and in his despair he told himself that at last the
day of reckoning had come. Poor Blight! It is difficult to withhold our
sympathy from him.

The door opened, and his wife, the Countess of Blight, came into the
library.

"Blight!" she whispered. "My poor Blight! What has happened?"

He looked up haggardly.

"Gertie," he said, for that was her name, "it is all over. My sins have
found me out."

"Not sins," she said gently. "Mistakes."

"Mistakes, yes--you are right." He stretched out a hand, took a letter
from the desk in front of him and gave it to her. "Read that." With a
groan he buried his head in his hands again. She took it and read, slowly
and wonderingly, these words:--

"To lawn-mower as delivered, L5 17s. 6d."

Lord Blight looked up with an impatient ejaculation "Give it to me," he
said in some annoyance, snatching it away from her and throwing it into
the waste-paper basket. "Here, this is the one. Read it; read it quickly;
for we must decide what to do."

She read it with starting eyes.

"DEAR SIR,--I am prepared to lend you anything from L10 to L10,000 on
your note-of-hand alone. Should you wish--"

"D--n!" said the seventeenth Earl of Blight. "Here, where is the blessed
thing?" He felt in his pockets. "I must have--I only had it a--Ah, here
it is. Perhaps I had better read it to you this time." He put on his
spectacles--a present from an aunt--and read as follows:--

"MY LORD,--We regret to inform you that a claimant to the title has
arisen. It seems that, soon after the death of his first wife, the
sixteenth Earl of Blight contracted a second and secret marriage to Ellen
Podby, by whom he had eleven sons, the eldest of whom is now asserting
his right to the earldom and estates. Trusting to be favoured with your
instructions in the matter, We are, my lord,

"Yours faithfully,

"BILLINGS, BILLINGS & BILLINGS."

Gertie (Countess of Blight) looked at her husband in horror.

"Eleven!" she cried.

"Eleven," said the Earl gloomily.

Then a look of grim determination came into his eyes. With the air of one
who might have been quoting Keats, but possibly wasn't, he said firmly:

"What man has done, man can do."

That evening the Countess of Blight gave orders for eleven spare bedrooms
to be got ready.

II

On the morning after the arriv