“Is that the friend of the man you shot?” Sir Philip himself stood among the brushwood, attired in a light tweed suit, as cool and unmoved as though he had not been absent from home for more than a month. The accident had only taken place on the preceding evening, and Stephen judged by the small handbag that Sir Philip was carrying, and by the direction from which he was coming, that he had not been home. Yet already he was quite well acquainted with what had taken place in the woods on the preceding evening. But Stephen Lee had long before this suspected some system of spying by which the master of the Chase contrived to inform himself of the doings of his household in his absence, and he was not therefore much surprised by Sir Philip’s question, to which he responded, after his wont, in a civil monosyllable: “Yes, sir.” “This is the man called Pritchard?” “Yes, sir.” “How is Lord Carthew?” “Better.” “Did you shoot him accidentally?” “Partly.” “Explain yourself.” “You have often told me to keep off tramps and trespassers and such like,” the man answered, with a forced and rather sullen civility. “Lord Carthew stopped Miss Cranstoun’s horse and seemed to be annoying her. I fired to frighten him and he got hurt.” “Ah!” Sir Philip paused for a moment. His eyes followed the retreating figures of Lord Carthew and Stella as, with their heads inclined together in converse, they rode on together to a bend in the avenue between the trees. Then he turned to Stephen, his face set and mask-like as usual. “You were only obeying orders,” he said, and threw the man half a crown. The gypsy picked it up and glowered after his employer as the latter bent his steps towards the house. “I’ll drink to your destruction in this world and the next,” he said; “but I’m hanged if I can make out what you are up to. Old Sarah will understand, perhaps. She’s a match in cunning even for _you_.” All this time Lord Carthew was learning from Stella’s lips all that there was to tell of her life as it was lived on the surface. She was seventeen last Christmas, she told him, and she believed it to be true, ignoring that first year of life which she had passed in London as the unloved child of a gypsy mother. For months past she had been trained in the correct way of bowing, kissing the Queen’s hand, and backing out of the royal presence over her train by a duly qualified lady, who had attended at the Chase in order to impart to her this highly necessary instruction, and she made Lord Carthew laugh by her lively description of these lessons. “Don’t you feel horribly nervous about it?” he asked. She turned her large black eyes upon him in surprise. “Oh, no, not in the least,” she answered. “All this London trip I should look forward to eagerly, I think, but for leaving poor mamma, and--and for something else.”