For some reason, deep hidden yet delicately distinct, Cynthia extracted a good deal more from that simple speech than the mere words implied. The air of the downs was peculiarly fresh and strong in the center of the bridge, a fact which probably accounted for the vivid color that lit her face and added luster to her bright eyes. At any rate, she dropped the conversation suddenly. "Mrs. Devar will be growing quite impatient," she said, with an admirable assumption of ease, "and I want to buy some pictures of this pretty toy bridge of yours. What a pity the light is altogether wrong for a snapshot, and it _is_ so stupid to use films when one knows that the sun is in the camera!" Whereat Medenham breathed freely again, while thanking the gods for the delightfully effective resources that every woman--even a candid, outspoken Cynthia--has at her fingers' ends. The simplest means of reaching the Gloucester road was to run back past the hotel, but the goddess of happy chance elected, for her own purposes, that Medenham should ask a policeman to direct him to Cabot's Tower, and, the man having the brain of a surveyor, he was sent through by-streets that saved a few yards, perhaps, but cost him many minutes in stopping to inquire the way. Hence, he missed an amazing sight. The merest glimpse of Count Edouard Marigny's new acquaintance would surely have pulled him up, if it did not put an end to the tour forthwith. But that was not to be. Blissfully unconscious of the fact that the Frenchman was eagerly explaining to a dignified yet strangely perturbed old gentleman that the car Number X L 4000--containing a young American lady and her friend, and driven by a conceited puppy of a chauffeur who suffered badly from _tete montee_--had just gone up the hill to the left, Medenham at last reached the open road, and the Mercury leaped forward as if Gloucester would hardly wait till it arrived there. The old gentleman had only that minute alighted from a station cab, and a question he addressed to the hall-porter led that civil functionary to refer him to Marigny "as a friend of the parties concerned." But the newcomer drew himself up somewhat stiffly when the foreign personage spoke of Medenham as a "puppy." "Before our conversation proceeds any farther I think I ought to tell you that I am the Earl of Fairholme and that Viscount Medenham is my son," he said. Marigny looked so blank at this that the Earl's explanation took fresh shape. "I mean," he went on, perceiving that his hearer was none the wiser, "I mean that the chauffeur you allude to is Viscount Medenham." Marigny, though born on the banks of the Loire, was a Southern Frenchman by descent, and the hereditary tint of olive in his skin became prominent only when his emotions were aroused. Now the pink and white of his complexion was tinged with yellowish-green. Never before in his life had he been quite so surprised--never. "He--he said his name was Fitzroy," was all he could gasp.