ns me rather
closely."

Lord Westerham sobered down at once, although his voice was still
somewhat tremulous with suppressed laughter when he said:

"My dear chap, I'm very sorry. It was beastly rude of me to laugh, but
I'm quite sure you'll forgive me when you know the facts or, at least,
_the_ fact, and that is as follows, as they say in the newspapers. When
I tell you that your sweetheart drove my sweetheart up to the house
to-day from Settle--"

"What, Norah Castellan!" exclaimed Lennard. "I didn't even know that you
had met her before."

"Haven't I!" replied Lord Westerham. "Look here, it was this way."

And then he began a story of a fishing and shooting trip to Connemara,
where he had rented certain salmon streams and shooting moors from a
squire of the county, named Lismore, who was very much in love with
Norah Castellan, and how he had fished and shot and yachted with her and
the brother who had sold his diabolical inventions to the enemies of
England, until he had come to love the sister as much as he hated the
brother. And when he had done, Lennard told him of the swimming race in
Clifden Bay, and many other things to which Lord Westerham listened with
an interest which grew more and more intense as every minute passed;
until when Lennard stopped, he crossed the road and held out his hand
and said:

"I've got the very place to suit you. A cannel-coal mine near Bolton in
Lancashire with a perpendicular shaft, twelve hundred feet deep. The
very place to do your work. It's yours from to-day, and if the thing
comes off, Papa Parmenter shall give a couple of hundred thousand dowry
instead of buying the mine. I don't think he'll kick at that. Now, let's
go back and have a whisky-and-soda. I've got to be off recruiting
to-morrow."

"I wish I could join the Yeomanry and come with you, if you would have
me," laughed Lennard, whose spirits had been rising rapidly during the
last half-hour or so, "only I reckon, as Mr Parmenter would put it, that
I shall have all my work cut out getting ready to give our celestial
invader a warm reception. To begin with, it won't exactly be child's
play building a cannon twelve hundred feet long."

"I wonder what they'd think of a proposition like that at the War
Office?" laughed Lord Westerham in reply. "Several permanent officials
would certainly faint on the spot."

A sharp frost set in during the night, and the sky was brilliantly
clear. After dinner, when the ladies had