Gradually the conversation turned on that still so secret and mysterious country with which Sir George Downing was now intimately connected. His slow voice, even, toneless, as is so often that of those who have lived long in the East, acted, Wantley soon found, as a complete screen, when he chose that it should be so, to his thoughts. Suddenly, and, as it appeared, in no connection with what had just been said at the moment, Lady Wantley, turning to Downing, observed, 'I perceive that you have a number-led mind?' Penelope looked up apprehensively, but her brow cleared as the man to whom had been addressed this singular remark replied simply and deferentially: 'If you mean that certain days are marked in my life, it is certainly so. Matters of moment are connected in my mind with the number seven.' Wantley and Cecily Wake both looked at the speaker with extreme astonishment. 'I felt sure that it was so!' exclaimed Lady Wantley. 'Seven has also always been my number, but the knowledge inspires me with no fear or horror. It simply makes me aware that my times are in our Father's hands.' She added, in a lower voice: 'All predestination is centralized in God's elect, and all concurrent wills of the creature are thereunto subordinated.' 'He may be odd, but he must certainly think us odder,' thought Wantley, not without enjoyment. But a cloud had come over Penelope's face. 'Mamma!' she said anxiously, and then again, 'Mamma!' 'I think he knows what I mean,' said Lady Wantley, fixing the grey eyes which seemed to see at once so much and so little on the face of her daughter's guest. Again, to Wantley's surprise, Downing answered at once, and gravely enough: 'Yes, I think I do know what you mean, and on the whole I agree.' Mrs. Robinson, glancing at her cousin with what he thought a look of appeal, threw a pebble, very deliberately, into the deep pool where they all suddenly found themselves. 'Do you really believe in lucky numbers?' she asked flippantly. Downing looked at her fixedly for a moment. 'Yes,' he replied, 'and also in unlucky numbers.' 'I hope,' she cried--and as she spoke she reddened deeply--'that your first meeting with David Winfrith will take place on one of your lucky days. He is believed to have more influence concerning the matter you are interested in just now than anyone else, for he claims to have studied the question on the spot.' 'Ah!' thought Wantley, pleased as a man always is to receive what he believes to be the answer to a riddle; 'I know now what has brought Persian Downing to Monk's Eype!' and he also took up the ball. 'Winfrith claims,' he said, 'to have made Persia his special study. I believe he once spent six weeks there, on the strength of which he wrote a book. You probably came across him when he was in Teheran.'