"But what I am chiefly doing," he said, "is marvelling at the change that has come over life in my time. I can no more fancy my father taking me to the Derby than to an opium den; yet here am I placidly seated in the same dissolute vehicle as my unmarried daughter, on our way to the great reprehensible annual carnival of vice." "Yes," said Ann, "and you one of the newest K.C.B.s too, fresh from the King's presence." "By the way," said Dollie, "the King will be there to-day. He always goes to the Derby. Perhaps you'll meet, sir. You know each other now, don't you?" "I shall never forget him as long as I live," said Sir Gaston; "but even if he, as is likely, has forgotten my face, the spectacle of my legs, in hired knee-breeches, walking perilously backwards with a sword between them, must be indelibly printed on his memory." "Do tell me," said Naomi. "Was it very dreadful?" "Very," said Sir Gaston. "We did our best to hearten each other, but the dentist is nothing to it. Decent fellows we were, most of us: brewers, music hall managers, actors, Party-plutocrats, caterers, and so forth, all armed to the teeth, all conscious of clothes we had never worn before and should probably never wear again--which is in itself an embarrassment--and all on the brink of changing our identity for ever." "How do you mean?" Naomi asked. "Why, all my life until then, or a few days before (but unofficially, of course, since the accolade had not been bestowed), I have been to the world Mr. Ingleside. My Christian name, which always seemed to me a strangely affected one and was due to my mother as a young woman having deplorable romantic tendencies, I have done my best to suppress. And now the Ingleside alone goes for ever, and everyone is entitled to call me Sir Gaston." "I almost wonder you accepted the title," Naomi said. "My dear Mrs. Falconer," said Sir Gaston, "I wonder, too, now; but at the time there seemed to be several rather good reasons. Perhaps the best of all was that I was a widower." Sir Gaston gave me a sidelong glance here which I greatly esteemed. Here was good company; old in bottle. The joke was lost, I fear, on Naomi, who puckered her beautiful forehead over it in vain. As for the rest, they had not been listening to us at all but were busy watching the occupants of the other carriages, with some of whom Dollie and Farrar were on very familiar terms. We reached the course at last and the Grand Stand, where Farrar, who seems to be a millionaire, had a box for the week, in which not only were chairs but a very attractive lunch. I thanked him later in the day for being so hospitable to strangers. "That's all right," he said, almost as if I had apologized for something.