Produced by Cathy Maxam, Juliet Sutherland and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Helena's Path _By_ ANTHONY HOPE AUTHOR OF DOUBLE HARNESS TRISTRAM OF BLENT ETC. [Illustration] GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1912 _Copyright, 1907, by Anthony Hope Hawkins_ CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I AMBROSE, LORD LYNBOROUGH 3 II LARGELY TOPOGRAPHICAL 15 III OF LAW AND NATURAL RIGHTS 33 IV THE MESSAGE OF A PADLOCK 52 V THE BEGINNING OF WAR 70 VI EXERCISE BEFORE BREAKFAST 90 VII ANOTHER WEDGE! 110 VIII THE MARCHESA MOVES 127 IX LYNBOROUGH DROPS A CATCH 148 X IN THE LAST RESORT 171 XI AN ARMISTICE 186 XII AN EMBASSAGE 206 XIII THE FEAST OF ST. JOHN BAPTIST 223 HELENA'S PATH _Chapter One_ AMBROSE, LORD LYNBOROUGH Common opinion said that Lord Lynborough ought never to have had a peerage and forty thousand a year; he ought to have had a pound a week and a back bedroom in Bloomsbury. Then he would have become an eminent man; as it was, he turned out only a singularly erratic individual. So much for common opinion. Let no more be heard of its dull utilitarian judgements! There are plenty of eminent men--at the moment, it is believed, no less than seventy Cabinet and ex-Cabinet Ministers (or thereabouts)--to say nothing of Bishops, Judges, and the British Academy,--and all this in a nook of the world! (And the world too is a point!) Lynborough was something much more uncommon; it is not, however, quite easy to say what. Let the question be postponed; perhaps the story itself will answer it. He started life--or was started in it--in a series of surroundings of unimpeachable orthodoxy--Eton, Christ Church, the Grenadier Guards. He left each of these schools of mental culture and bodily discipline, not under a cloud--that metaphor would be ludicrously inept--but in an explosion. That, having been thus shot out of the first, he managed to enter the second--that, having been shot out of the second, he walked placidly into the third--that, having been shot out of the third, he suffered no apparent damage from his repeated propulsions--these are matters explicable only by a secret knowledge of British institutions. His father was strong, his mother came of stock even stronger; he himself--Ambrose Caverly as he then was--was very popular, and extraordinarily handsome in his unusual outlandish style.