Produced by Annie McGuire, from scans obtained from Google Print project. Her Ladyship's Elephant By D. D. Wells London William Heinemann 1912 FIRST EDITION, 3s. 6d., _May 1898_. NEW IMPRESSIONS, _August 1898_; _November 1899_; _September 1905_. HEINEMANN'S SEVENPENNY NOVELS, _July 1912_. [Illustration: "He sat down hurriedly on the breakfast table"] HEINEMANN'S Sevenpenny Novels By Hall Caine The Bondman The Scapegoat By R. L. Stevenson The Ebb-Tide (With LLOYD OSBOURNE) By Jack London The Call of the Wild By H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds By Robert S. Hichens Flames By R. Harding Davis Soldiers of Fortune By E. L. Voynich The Gadfly By Maxwell Gray The Last Sentence By D. D. Wells Her Ladyship's Elephant _A WORD TO THE WISE_ _A well-known English novelist once told me that of all his published works--and their name is legion--one only had been founded on fact, and that one his critics united in condemning as impossible and unnatural. In the case of my own little book, I venture to forestall such criticism by stating that while the characters which appear in its pages are at the most only composite photographs, the one "impossible" and "unnatural" figure, the elephant, had his foundation in actual fact; and the history of its acquirement by the Consul, as hereinafter set forth, is the truthful narration of an actual experience, one of many episodes, stranger than fiction, which went to form the warp and woof of my diplomatic experience._ _DAVID DWIGHT WELLS._ CHAPTER I IN WHICH THE SAME QUESTION IS ANSWERED IN TWO WAYS Harold Stanley Malcolm St. Hubart Scarsdale, Esq., of "The Towers," Sussex, sat uncomfortably on a very comfortable chair. His patent-leather boots were manifestly new, his trousers fresh from the presser, his waistcoat immaculate, while his frock coat with its white gardenia, and his delicate grey suede gloves, completed an admirable toilet. He was, in short, got up for the occasion, a thoroughly healthy, muscular, well-groomed animal; good-natured too, fond in his big-hearted boyish way of most other animals, and enough of a sportsman to find no pleasure in winging tame or driven grouse and pheasants. He was possessed, moreover, of sufficient brains to pass with credit an examination which gave him a post in the War Office, and had recently become, owing to the interposition of Providence and a restive mare, the eldest son. In spite of all this, he was very much out of his depth as he sat there; for he was face to face with a crisis in his life, and that crisis was embodied in a woman. And such a woman!--quite unlike anything his conservative British brain had ever seen or imagined before the present London season: a mixture of Parisian daintiness and coquetry, nicely tempered by Anglo-Saxon breeding and common sense--in a word, an American.