can 'ship himself all aboard of a ship,' like Lord Bateman in the
ballad, and go anywhere. Anywhere, yes!--but in this case I wonder where
he will go? Possibly to America--yet no!--I think not!" And Sir Francis,
descending his office stairs, went out into the broad sunshine which
flooded the city streets, continuing his inward reverie as he
walked,--"I think not. From what he said the other night, I fancy not
even the haunting memory of 'ole Virginny' will draw him back _there_.
'Consider me as lost,' he says. An odd notion! David Helmsley, one of
the richest men in the whole of two continents, wishes to lose himself!
Impossible! He's a marked multi-millionaire,--branded with the golden
sign of unlimited wealth, and as well known as a London terminus! If he
were 'lost' to-day, he'd be found to-morrow. As matters stand I daresay
he'll turn up all fight in a month's time and I need not worry my head
any more about him!"

With this determination Sir Francis went home to luncheon, and after
luncheon duly appeared driving in the Park with Lady Vesey, like the
attentive and obliging husband he ever was, despite the boredom which
the "Row" and the "Ladies' Mile" invariably inflicted upon him,--yet
every now and then before him there rose a mental image of his old
friend "King David,"--grey, sad-eyed, and lonely--flitting past like
some phantom in a dream, and wandering far away from the crowded vortex
of London life, where his name was as honey to a swarm of bees, into
some dim unreachable region of shadow and silence, with the brief
farewell:

"Consider me as lost!"

CHAPTER V

Among the many wild and lovely tangles of foliage and flower which
Nature and her subject man succeed in working out together after
considerable conflict and argument, one of the most beautiful and
luxuriant is a Somersetshire lane. Narrow and tortuous, fortified on
either side with high banks of rough turf, topped by garlands of
climbing wild-rose, bunches of corn-cockles and tufts of meadow-sweet,
such a lane in midsummer is one of beauty's ways through the world,--a
path, which if it lead to no more important goal than a tiny village or
solitary farm, is, to the dreamer and poet, sufficiently entrancing in
itself to seem a fairy road to fairyland. Here and there some grand elm
or beech tree, whose roots have hugged the soil for more than a century,
spreads out broad protecting branches all a-shimmer with green
leaves,--between the u