ort of man I
wanted to see. Has your chief come down yet?"

"He's only staying for dinner," replied Bullen, with his eye on the
yellow ball. "He's got a great speech to-morrow at Birmingham and
he's going straight through to-night. He's motoring himself there;
driving the car, I mean. It's the one thing he's really proud of."

"You mean you're staying here with your uncle, like a good boy?"
replied Fisher. "But what will the Chief do at Birmingham without
the epigrams whispered to him by his brilliant secretary?"

"Don't you start ragging me," said the young man called Bunker.
"I'm only too glad not to go trailing after him. He doesn't know a
thing about maps or money or hotels or anything, and I have to dance
about like a courier. As for my uncle, as I'm supposed to come into
the estate, it's only decent to be here sometimes."

"Very proper," replied the other. "Well, I shall see you later on,"
and, crossing the lawn, he passed out through a gap in the hedge.

He was walking across the lawn toward the landing stage on the
river, and still felt all around him, under the dome of golden
evening, an Old World savor and reverberation in that riverhaunted
garden. The next square of turf which he crossed seemed at first
sight quite deserted, till he saw in the twilight of trees in one
corner of it a hammock and in the hammock a man, reading a newspaper
and swinging one leg over the edge of the net.

Him also he hailed by name, and the man slipped to the ground and
strolled forward. It seemed fated that he should feel something of
the past in the accidents of that place, for the figure might well
have been an early-Victorian ghost revisiting the ghosts of the
croquet hoops and mallets. It was the figure of an elderly man with
long whiskers that looked almost fantastic, and a quaint and careful
cut of collar and cravat. Having been a fashionable dandy forty
years ago, he had managed to preserve the dandyism while ignoring
the fashions. A white top-hat lay beside the Morning Post in the
hammock behind him. This was the Duke of Westmoreland, the relic of
a family really some centuries old; and the antiquity was not
heraldry but history. Nobody knew better than Fisher how rare such
noblemen are in fact, and how numerous in fiction. But whether the
duke owed the general respect he enjoyed to the genuineness of his
pedigree or to the fact that he owned a vast amount of very valuable
property was a point about which Mr. Fishe