f curiosity and
kindness, to her companion's.

"It's a surprise, and a delightful one," she remarked, "having pushed so
far afield in a foreign land, to be met by the good offices of a
fellow-countryman--it's so nice of you to be English."

And her eyes softly changed, their curiosity being veiled by a kind of
humorous content.

The young man's face, from its altitude of six-feet-something, beamed
responsively down upon her.

"Oh," he laughed, "you mustn't give me too much credit. To be English
nowadays is so ingloriously easy--since foreign lands have become merely
the wider suburbs of London."

Lady Blanchemain's eyes lighted approvingly. Afterwards she looked half
serious.

"True," she discriminated, "London has spread pretty well over the whole
of Europe; but England, thanks be to goodness, still remains mercifully
small."

"Yes," agreed the young man, though with a lilt of dubiety, and a frown
of excogitation, as if he weren't sure that he had quite caught her
drift.

"The mercy of it is," she smilingly pointed out, "that English folk,
decent ones, have no need to fight shy of each other when they meet as
strangers. We all know more or less about each other by hearsay, or
about each other's people; and we're all pretty sure to have some common
acquaintances. The smallness of England makes for sociability and
confidence."

"It ought to, one would think," the young man admitted. "But does it, in
fact? It had somehow got stuck in my head that English folk, meeting as
strangers, were rather apt to glare. We're most of us in such a funk,
you see, lest, if we treat a stranger with civility, he should turn out
not to be a duke."

"Oh," cried Lady Blanchemain, with merriment, "you forget that I said
_decent_. I meant, of course, folk who _are_ dukes. We're all dukes--or
bagmen."

The young man chuckled; but in a minute he pulled a long face, and made
big, ominous eyes.

"I feel I ought to warn you," he said in a portentous voice, "that some
of us are mere marquises--of the house of Carabas."

Lady Blanchemain, her whole expansive person, simmered with enjoyment.

"Bless you," she cried, "those are the ducalest, for marquises--of the
house of Carabas--are men of dash and spirit, born to bear everything
before them, and to marry the King's daughter."

With that, she had a moment of abstraction. Again, her eyeglass up, she
glanced round the walls--hung, in this octagonal room, with dim-coloured
portraits