‘If I were of a brave disposition I would go myself,’ said Lord Rex, when Gaston had sauntered placidly off on his mission. ‘But I am not. I am a coward down to the ground. Peace at any price is my motto, politically and otherwise. To-day I am feeling more than usually nervous--not half “go” enough in me to stand up under one of Marjorie Bartrand’s snubbings.’ ‘I cannot say your modesty makes itself known to the world by outward and visible signs.’ ‘Modesty--no! I understand you, madam. A man may have forward manners but a faint heart.’ Lord Rex Basire’s arm, in justice let it be spoken, got a bullet through it in hot warfare. This dandified boy was in the thick of more than one African fight when clouds gathered dark above the English colours, was all but drowned on a never-to-be-forgotten night while attempting to carry succour to the wounded, left with their solitary gallant surgeon, on an abandoned position. ‘I tried once, at a militia review or something, to talk to Marjorie, just in the usual way one talks, not without success you know, to girls of her age.’ ‘And the result was?’ asked Linda. ‘She looked at me coolly--grand Spanish eyes of hers those are, bar the temper in them! “You are fresh from Eton, are you not?” she observed. I confessed that Eton had known me in my youth. “Talk about Eton, then,” struck out Miss Bartrand, straight from the shoulder. “Talk about cricket, football, boating, Latin grammar, if you learnt any. I will not,” with a murderous flash from her big eyes, “listen to foolishness from any man.”’ By the time Lord Rex finished this characteristic anecdote Gaston Arbuthnot, with his usual expression of genial impenetrability, had sauntered back to the refreshment tent. Picking up Rahnee, he asked the child what ailed her? For Rahnee’s face, sickly at all times, wore a look and hue forlornly out of keeping with the bravery of her attire. ‘What in the world has befallen the infant, Mrs. Thorne? Her complexion is of the lively arsenic green the doctors forbid us to use in wall papers.’ ‘Rahnee! mamma’s own darling pet, what is the matter?’ cried Linda, suddenly recalled to the fact of her darling’s existence. ‘Me eat matazoons. Bad matazoons!’ whimpered Rahnee, with the tender conscience, the quick physical repentance of her age. ‘That is a wise little Rahnee,’ said Gaston Arbuthnot, kissing her. ‘Right morality. Pitch into our pleasures the moment our pleasures begin to pitch into us.’ ‘Have you seen her?’ exclaimed Lord Rex. ‘This kind of trifling, remember, may be fun to all of you. It’s stretched high above a joke to me. A tall fair girl, dressed in black----’ ‘With a crimson rose in her hair,’ added Linda, ‘and walking with Marjorie Bartrand of Tintajeux.’ ‘Well, yes,’ Gaston admitted in the lapses of whispered consolation to poor Rahnee, ‘I have seen her.’ ‘And who is she?’ exclaimed Linda Thorne. ‘I am almost as curious as Lord Rex. Have you discovered this new Dulcinea’s name?’