y spoke with discouragement. She had the matchmaking fever in
her blood. Martin Hillyard remembered her glance when he had casually
spoken of Harry Luttrell. Then she startled him with words which he was
never to forget, and in which he chose to find a real profundity.

"The right man has not come along. So Joan mistakes anything odd for
something great, and thinks that to be unusual is to be strong. It's a
mood of young people who have not yet waked up."

They drove to the private stand and walked through into the paddock.
Millie Splay looked round at the gay and brilliant throng. She sighed.

"There she is, moping in the drawing-room over Prince
Hohenstiel--whatever his name is. She _won't_ come to Goodwood. No, she
just won't."

Yet Joan Whitworth did come to Goodwood that year, though not upon this
day.

No one in that household had read the newspapers so carefully each day
as Martin Hillyard. As the prospect darkened each morning, he was in a
distress lest a letter should not have been forwarded from his flat in
London, or should have been lost in the post. Each evening when the
party returned from the races his first question asked whether there was
no telegram awaiting him. So regular and urgent were his inquiries that
the house-party could not be ignorant of his preoccupation. And on the
afternoon of the Thursday a telegram in its orange envelope was lying
upon the hall-table.

"It's for you, Mr. Hillyard," said Lady Splay.

Hillyard held it in his hands. So the summons had come, the summons
hoped for, despaired of, made so often into a whip wherewith he lashed
his arrogance, the summons to serve.

"I shall have to go up to town this evening," he said.

Anxious faces gathered about him.

"Oh, don't do that!" said Harold Jupp. "We have just got to like you."

"Yes, wait until to-morrow, my dear boy," Sir Chichester suggested.
Even Joan Whitworth descended to earth and requested that he should
stay.

"It's awfully kind of you," stammered Martin. "But I am afraid that this
is very important."

Lady Splay was practical.

"Hadn't you better see first?" she asked.

Hillyard, with his thoughts playing swiftly in the future like a rapier,
was still standing stock-still with the unopened telegram in his hand.

"Of course," he said. "But I know already what it is."

The anxious little circle closed nearer as he tore open the envelope. He
read:

"_I have refused the Duke. Money is cash--I mean t