“You are not going to tell me,” exclaimed Hilary, “that a man of your intellectual attainments attaches the slightest importance to such utter nonsense as professional fortune-telling? I shall begin to believe study has turned your brain.” “Just as you like,” said Lord Carthew, shrugging his shoulders with sudden indifference. “But to return to our former subject, grant me this favor, Hilary. It will certainly be our last outing together for a long time, possibly forever. You are going to settle out there, you will marry----” “Not exactly,” broke in Hilary, with hearty emphasis. “Marriage isn’t part of my programme, by any means. I’ve got to make my way and to make money, and I don’t want a burden around my neck to start with.” “Anyhow, our ways will widen apart. It will do you no harm to lend me your name for a few days. I will solemnly vow not to bring it into discredit, and if the trick be found out, it will only be considered as another freak of ‘mad Carthew,’ as they call me at Oxford.” “I don’t care to go masquerading about the country in borrowed plumes----” “Still, you must, just for a day or two, until I have made you own I was in the right, about the snobbishness and all that. How can it affect you? We shall probably only meet innkeepers, chance visitors, waiters, and hostlers, and you are just leaving England and not in the least likely to see any of them again.” He was so persistent in his arguments that Hilary at length agreed, for peace and quiet, to fall in with his views, at least tacitly. “But you must do all the lying,” he stipulated. “I lie with the most confounded clumsiness. Besides, I don’t like it. I’ll humor your whim so far as to call you Claud only and not Carthew, and to answer to my own name. And on your head be all the complications which may arise from your silly freak.” The time had passed swiftly by in talk, and the shadows had grown longer in the lanes, where the air was sweet with budding hawthorn, and birds twittered in the hedges. For the past hour their way had led them alongside of a very spacious and thickly-wooded park, and at this point Lord Carthew, curious as to its ownership, questioned a passing field laborer, who looked at him in surprise. “That’s the Chase, sir, Sir Philip Cranstoun’s place,” he said, with evident compassion for the inquirer’s ignorance as he passed on. “Cranstoun?” Lord Carthew repeated the name meditatively. “He’s a Baronet, to be sure, and has a capital place, Cranstoun Hall, near Balmoral. Splendid shooting. He’s a distant connection of ours through his wife, who was Lady Gwendolen Douglas, daughter of the Duke of Lanark. She was my grandmother’s niece; consequently, she is some relation to me, but what I can scarcely define.” “Are you going to look her up, too, on the strength of it?”