"Aurora Banishing Night, eh?" he cried, with horizontal beard and upturned eyes. "She'd jolly soon banish _my_ night, certainly; it should be, banishing sleep! And all those naked little nippers! They ought to be papered over, for decency's sake; and that brute of a bed, who would sleep in it, I should like to know? Not me. Not much! It must be twenty-foot high and ten-foot wide; it gives me the hump to look at it, and the ceilings give it me worse. See here, Claude, we'll lock up these State Apartments, as you call them, and you shall keep the key. I'm full of 'em; they'll give me bad dreams as it is." They were not, however, the only apartments of which the Duke disapproved; the suite which had been done up entirely for his own use, under Claude's direction, did not long commend itself to the ex-stockman. Everything was far too good for him and his cats; they were not accustomed to such splendour; it made them all four uncomfortable--so Jack declared after taking Claude's breath away with the eccentric plan on which he had set his heart. And for the remainder of their solitary companionship each man had his own occupation; the Duke preparing more congenial quarters for himself and the cats; and Claude, with Jack's permission and the agent's skilled advice, superintending the making of private golf-links for Mr. Sellwood's peculiar behoof. For the Home Secretary had promised to join the Maske party, for the week-ends at any rate, until (as he expressed it) the Government "holed out." That party was now finally arranged. The Frekes were coming with the Sellwoods, and the latter family were to have the luxurious suite which the Duke himself disdained. This was his Grace's own idea. Moreover, he interested himself personally in the right ordering of the rooms during the last few days; but this he kept to himself until the eleventh hour; in fact, until he was waiting for the drag to come round, which he was himself going to tool over to Devenholme to meet his guests. It was then that certain unexpected misgivings led Jack to seek out his cousin, in order to take him to see what he had done. For Claude had shown him what _he_ was doing. He was producing a set of exceedingly harmless verses, "To Olivia released from Mayfair," of which the Duke had already heard the rough draft. The fair copy was in the making even now; in the comparatively small room, at one end of the library, that Jack had already christened the Poet's Corner.