* * * * * The veering of scandal’s vane had afforded considerable relief to the Duke and Duchess of Lancashire. His Grace found that he could walk the streets once more and enter his clubs without the inconvenience of feeling himself a marked man; and the Duchess, resuming her social activities, rejoiced in discussing the affair almost from an outsider’s standpoint. Dormer Greetland was disposed to be very jocular on the subject. “The poor Duke,” he said, “is going about like a convict on ticket-of-leave. He has been serving his time with the Duchess, and a very uncomfortable time it has evidently been. They say she has taken the unique opportunity of wigging the poor man for every act of his somewhat monotonous career. According to her he has never done anything right in all his life, except marrying her, and even there she has never forgiven him for not being a more interesting bridegroom. The wretched Duke, who can’t help his personality, was brought up to rely upon his strawberry leaves, and in the faith of the gospel that a Duke need not bother about intellect or even appearance. For the last ten years he has been enduring the process of having all that nonsense shaken out of him, and the Duchess can put plenty of vim into her shaking. Yes; this affair has afforded an excellent opportunity for summing up the evidence against him, and he has been found guilty on every count of the indictment. He has had a pretty bad time of it. He could only plead his dukedom, but he could hardly expect that to go down with his partner in it, who was at once judge and prosecuting counsel. They say things got so bad that he had to lock himself up in his own rooms and subsist on a stray tin of biscuits, a miscellaneous assortment of tabloids, and a syphon of soda-water flavoured with bay rum. The regimen has had such a lowering effect on his constitution that he is more ducal than ever. He is so fine-drawn, what with his troubles matrimonial and commissariat, that Percy Nayland as he saw him go into the Carlton said he looked like the ghost of the Feudal System in a frock-coat.” “And in the meantime, what is going to be done about the business?” some one asked. “So far as I can make out,” the quidnunc answered, “it is going to be left to develop.” “Is Scotland Yard going to take it up?” “I don’t see how they can.” “Not against Countess Alexia von Rohnburg?” “My dear Monty,” Greetland returned, “as things stand, they can’t do it. They have nothing to go upon. You must remember, what the public never will understand, that moral proof does not necessarily constitute legal evidence. Granted that this ornamental stiletto, which has been found, belonged to the Countess, also that she and Reggie Martindale were together alone in the room not long before the tragedy was discovered, it establishes a _primâ facie_ case against her, but, so far, nothing more.” “Circumstantial evidence, surely?”