He was silent for a moment, then with tears in his eyes and a break in his habitual cynical drawl, “I can’t go, Eve. I can’t give her up.” Evelyn’s heart ached, but she did not show it. She simply asked in her usual tone of almost icy calm, “Where’s the cash to come from?” He collapsed helplessly into a chair. There was no alternative--he must go; he must marry money. He owed it to his family and position; also, he wanted it himself--what is a “gentleman” without money? And--why, if he did not bestir himself he might actually have to go to work! And “what the devil could I work at? I might go out to service--I’d shine as a gentleman’s gentleman--or I might do something as a billiard marker----” With such dangers and degradations imminent, to think of love was sheer madness. Frothingham sighed and stared miserably through his monocle at the peacocks squawking their nerve-jarring predictions of rain. II On the second day out, in the morning, Frothingham was at the rail, his back to the sea, his glassed gaze roaming aimlessly up and down the row of passengers stretched at full length in steamer chairs. He became conscious of the manœuvrings of a little man in a little grey cap and little grey suit, with little grey side-whiskers that stood out like fins on either side of his little grey face. Each time this little person passed it was with a nervous smile at Frothingham, and a nervous wiping of the lips with the tip of his tongue. When he saw that Frothingham, or, rather, Frothingham’s monocle, was noting him, he halted in front of him. He was too painfully self-conscious to see that the Englishman’s look was about as cordial as that of a bald-headed man watching the circlings of a bluebottle fly. “The Earl of Frothingham, is it not?” said he in a thin, small voice, his American overlaid with the most un-English of English accents. [Illustration: “_My name is Longview_”] Frothingham moved his head without relaxing from his stolid, vacant look. “My name is Longview. I had the honour of meeting you at the hunt at Market Harboro two years ago--my daughter and I.” Frothingham stared vaguely into space, little Longview looking up at him with an expression of ludicrously alarmed anxiety. “Oh, yes,” he drawled finally. And he extended his hand with condescending graciousness. “I remember.” Longview expelled a big breath of relief. He was used to being forgotten, was not unused to remaining forgotten. “You may recall,” he hastened on, eager to clinch himself in an earl’s memory, “we had your cousin, Lord Ramsay’s place, Cedric Hall, that year.” Frothingham remembered perfectly--the rich, Anglicised American who fed his neighbours well, was generous in lending mounts and traps, and was, altogether, a useful and not unamusing nuisance. Rich, but--how rich? “And your daughter?” said Frothingham--he recalled her indistinctly as young, hoydenish, and a daring jumper.