‘But if you want to oblige Jessie and me’ (Jessie was the younger sister) ‘you will come at once, as there are to be grand doings at Lady Baker’s next week; and eligible young men being scarce in this neighbourhood, we should be glad to have a good-looking cousin to show off. Papa escorts us, of course; but as he always contrives to get among the old fogies who talk vestry and quarter-sessions, we might almost as well be without any escort at all. So do come, dear Geoff, and oblige your always affectionate cousin, ARABELLA HOSSACK. ‘P.S. Please call at Cramer’s, Chappell’s, and a few more of the publishers before you come, and bring us down anything they may recommend. Jessie wants some really good songs, and I should like Kalbé’s fantasias upon the newest Christy melodies.’ Lady Baker! Lucius had named this lady as one of the friends of his sister Janet; one of the county people whose notice had been the beginning of the fatal end. It was at Lady Baker’s house that Janet had met the villain who blighted her life. This was an all-sufficient reason for Geoffrey’s prompt acceptance of his cousin’s invitation. It was only by trying back that he could hope to discover the after-life of that man who had called himself Vandeleur, only by going back to the very beginning that he could hope to track his footsteps to the end. Could he but discover this scoundrel’s later history, and find it end in a grave, what happiness to carry the tidings of his discovery to Janet, and to say, ‘I bring you your freedom, and I claim you for my own by the right of my devotion!’ He knew that she loved him. That knowledge had power to comfort and sustain him in all the pain of severance. True love can live for a long time upon such nutriment as this. He wrote to Lucius, telling him where he was going, and what he was going to do, and started for Hillersdon next morning, laden with a portmanteau full of new music for those daughters of the horseleech, his cousins. Hillersdon Grange was, as Geoffrey confessed with the placid approval of a kinsman, ‘not half a bad place’ for an autumn visit. The house was old, a fine specimen of domestic architecture in the days of the Plantagenets. It had been expanded for the accommodation of modern inhabitants; a ponderous and somewhat ugly annex added in the reign of William the Third; a cloister turned into a drawing-room at a later period—as the requirements of civilised people grew larger. The fine old hall, with its open roof, once the living room of the mansion, was now an armoury, in which casques that had been hacked at Cressy, and hauberks that had been battered in the Wars of the Roses, were diversified by antlers and stuffed stags’ heads, the trophies of the hunting field in more pacific ages.