r still held
itself erect amidst the Tudor, Elizabethan, and Victorian additions to
the ancient place. It was called Queen's Langley now, had been so called
ever since the days when, in the beginning of the Civil War, Henrietta
Maria had been besieged there, during her visit to the then baronet, by
a small party of Roundheads, and had successfully kept them off. Queen's
Langley had been held during the Commonwealth by a member of the family,
who had declared for the Parliament, but had gone back to the head of
the house when he returned with his king at the Restoration.

At Queen's Langley Sir Rupert and his wife abode for a while, and at
Queen's Langley a child was born to them, a girl child, who was
christened after her mother, Helena. Then the taste for wandering, which
had become almost a passion with Sir Rupert, took possession of Sir
Rupert again. If he had expected to re-enter London in any kind of
triumph he was disappointed. He had allowed himself to fall out of the
race, and he found himself almost forgotten. Society, of course,
received him almost rapturously, and his beautiful wife was the queen of
a resplendent season. But politics seemed to have passed him by. The New
Toryism of those youthful years was not very new Toryism now. Sidney
Blenheim was a settled reactionary and a recognised celebrity. There was
a New Toryism, with its new cave of strenuous, impetuous young men, and
they, if they thought of Sir Rupert Langley at all, thought of him as
old-fashioned, the hero or victim of a piece of ancient history.

Nevertheless, Sir Rupert had his thoughts of entering political life
again, but in the meantime he was very happy. He had a steam yacht of
his own, and when his little girl was three years old he and his wife
went for a long cruise in the Mediterranean. And then his happiness was
taken away from him. His wife suddenly sickened, died, unconscious, in
his arms, and was buried at sea. Sir Rupert seemed like a broken man.
From Alexandria he wrote to his sister, who was married to the Duke of
Magdiel's third son, Lord Edmond Herrington, asking her to look after
his child for him--the child was then with her aunt at Herrington Hall,
in Argyllshire--in his absence. He sold his yacht, paid off his crew,
and disappeared for two years.

During those two years he was believed to have wandered all over Egypt,
and to have passed much of his time the hermit-like tenant of a tomb on
the lovely, lonely island of