"If you please, my lady, according to Timothy Bunting and Smith, who appear to have read it, it contains the true account of what happened at Goring House the other day, when all the gentlemen staying there, hearing from the _Times_ that your ladyship had a fine boy on the eighteenth, and no husband named by your ladyship’s particular directions, all got up one after the other, and, requesting private interviews with her upset Grace, the duchess, declared upon their oaths, though in secret, that they had married you themselves!" She recited this in a strange, mechanical way, which would have been extremely effective upon the stage, as a picture of hopeless conventionality wounded to death, and at last dying in sheer indifference to all things. "Dear me!" said Penelope, "dear me!" "It furthermore appears, my lady, begging your pardon for mentioning it, and I have reproved Bunting bitterly for daring to do so, though I haven’t read the fragments in the hat, that no one believes your ladyship’s word at all as to your being married." "Oh, how shameful!" said Penelope. "Why, here’s baby!" The nurse coughed and hid her mouth with her hand. "Yes, my lady, so he is," said Miss Mackarness. "There doesn’t seem any doubt whatsoever about that, but—" And Penelope sighed. Suddenly her face lighted up. "Ah!" she said, "I see why they said it to aunty. How very, very noble of them! I knew they were all splendid men; men of the highest character and attainments and possibilities. Will you have telegrams written out to all of them, saying, ’Your conduct is noble, and I am deeply grateful’?" "Yes, my lady," replied the housekeeper, "and how will you sign it?" "Sign it Penelope Brading," said Penelope. "And tell Smith to take his car as quickly as he can to Spilsborough, and send them from there." She lay back in her pillows. "They are noble fellows," she said. "I have done them an immense amount of good. A year ago not one of them could have risen to such heights of abnegation, such love, such tenderness. I shall see them bringing in a new era yet. Leopold Gordon will inaugurate a new and pure finance. The dear marquis will abolish anti-Semitism and duelling in France. De Vere will write poems of a purity appealing equally to Brixton and Belgravia, and my dear friend Carew will vindicate the Royal Academy’s policy of showing that charity begins at home. And the rest—ah, me! Poor dear aunty, how I love her!" And by the time that she had pondered over a renewed world, Geordie Smith was sending off the wires from Spilsborough with wonderful results. "I like this," said Smith. "This is what I like! There’s nothing dull about it. I wonder what’ll happen now? I’ll lay five to one I can guess!" He guessed right as to some, for in about four hours Rufus Plant arrived in Spilsborough on his racing-car, and put up at the Grand Hotel.