"I come, madam," he said, with that usual assumption of courtliness which he always treated her to since they had become estranged, "to bid you farewell for some few weeks. I will notify you by the post of my proposed return. Meanwhile your ladyship need not be dull. You have the entry now to the Court circles, you have also your respected father with you in this house. And there are many friends of your younger days in London"--he shot an evil, oblique glance at her out of the corner of his eye as he said this, which was not lost on her--"to wit, Mr. Archibald and--and--others. Doubtless ere I return you may have renewed some of your earlier acquaintanceships. They should be agreeable." For answer she gave him never a word, but, stirring her cup of chocolate leisurely, looked him straight in the face; then she let her eyes fall on the journal she had been perusing and again commenced to do so as though he were not in the room. "Curse her," muttered her husband to himself as her indifference stung him to the quick, "curse her, ere long the bolt shall be sped." After which he exclaimed: "My lady, as is ever the case, I perceive my presence is unwelcome. Once more I bid you adieu," and took himself out of the room and also out of the house. And so he set forth upon his journey. For a young man on the road to his old family seat, Lord Fordingbridge was that morning strangely preoccupied and indifferent to the events around him, and sat in his carriage huddled up in one corner of it more like an elderly sick man than aught else. The cheerful bustle of the village of Islington, the pretty country villas at Highgate, the larks singing over Finchley Common and Hadley Green, had no power to rouse him from his stupor--if stupor it was--nor either had the bright sun and the warm balmy spring air that came in at the open windows. A strange way for an English nobleman to set out upon his journey to the place where his forefathers had dwelt for ages! A strange way, indeed, considering that he might be regarded as an extremely fortunate man. The head of a family with strong Stuart tendencies, and suspected of himself participating in those tendencies, he had yet been at once received into favour by the King on returning to London. This alone should have made his heart light within him, for he had but now to conform to that King's demands to pass the rest of his existence in peace and full enjoyment of his comfortable means--to feel that his father's and his family's Jacobitism was forgotten, that all was well with him. George was now welcoming to his fold every exiled Jacobite who had not openly fought or plotted and schemed against him in the recent invasion, and many peers and gentlemen who had long lived abroad in exile were hastening to tender their adherence to the German king, feeling perfectly sure that, after the events of the past three months, the day of the Stuarts was past and gone for ever.