unjustly."

"You have a good memory," she retorted.

"Oh, is that in your book, Miss Vanrenen? Well, here is another fact
about Gloucester. Alfred the Great held a Witenagemot there in 896. Do
you know what a Witenagemot is?"

"Yes," she said, "a smoking concert."

Mrs. Devar invariably resented these bits of by-play, since she could
no more extract their meaning than if they were uttered in Choctaw.

"Some very good people live in Gloucestershire," she put in. "There
are the----" She began to give extracts from Burke's "Landed Gentry,"
whereupon the speedometer index sprang to forty-five, and a noble
fifteenth century tower soon lifted its stone lacework above the trees
and spires of the ancient city.

Cynthia wished to obtain some photographs of old inns, so, when
they had admired the cathedral, and shuddered at the memory of
Richard the Third--who wrote at Gloucester the order to Brackenbury
for the murder of the princes in the Tower of London--and smiled at
Cromwell's mordant wit in saying that the place had more churches
than godliness when told of the local proverb, "As sure as God's in
Gloucester," Medenham brought them to Northgate Street, where the New
Inn--which is nearly always the most antiquated hostelry in an English
country-town--supplied a fine example of massive timberwork, with
courtyard and external galleries.

The light was so perfect that he persuaded Cynthia to stand in a
doorway and let him take a picture. During the focusing interval, he
suggested that the day's route should be varied by leaving the coast
road at Westbury and running through the Forest of Dean, where a
secluded hotel in the midst of a real woodland would be an ideal place
for luncheon.

She agreed. Something in his tone told her that Mrs. Devar's consent
to the arrangement had better be taken for granted. So they sped
through the blossom-laden lanes of Gloucestershire to the leafy depths
of the Forest, and saw the High Beeches, and the Old Beech, and the
King's Walk, and many of the gorgeous vistas that those twin artists
Spring and Summer etched on the wooded undulations of one of Britain's
most delightful landscapes; as a fitting sequel to a run through
fairyland they lunched at the Speech House Hotel, where once the skins
of daring trespassers on the King's preserves were wont to be nailed
on the Court House door by the Verderers.

It was Cynthia who pointed the moral.

"There is always an ogre's cave near the En