A perspiring woman with a little boy in her arms clutched the station-master's sleeve and begged to be informed if the express that was now lying along the platform like a great sleek snake was the slow train to whatever insignificant market-town she was bound. It was annoying for the station-master to have his little chat with Lord Clarehaven interrupted like this, especially by a woman who seemed under the impression that he was a porter. However, the official possessed a store of nobility from which to oblige an importunate inferior, and majestically he condescended to reveal that the slow train would leave in half an hour from the obscure platform it haunted. The station-master was forthwith invited to look after a much-dinted tin box while the perspiring and anxious creature's little boy was accommodated in the cloak-room; before he could protest she had darted off. "Wonderful what they expect you to do for them, isn't it?" he laughed, with the lordly magnanimity that once inspired the English nation with confidence in the capacity of its chosen representatives to rule the world. At this moment a porter announced that his lordship's car was in the station-yard. "Be under no apprehensions about your baggage, my lord," said the station-master. "I shall expedite it myself. Be under no apprehensions," he repeated; "it will certainly reach Cherrington Lanes to-night." The porter, who was as eager as his chief to show his appreciation of being employed at a railway station patronized by Lord and Lady Clarehaven, overstepped the bounds of good will by picking up the perspiring woman's tin box in order to place it in the car. Luckily his chief perceived the horrible mistake in time and bellowed at him to take it out and leave it on the pavement outside the station. Then raising his cap, a gesture reserved for noblemen and irritation of the scalp, the station-master bowed Lord and Lady Clarehaven upon their way. "Car going well, Deacock?" "Not too well, my lord." "Make the old thing hum, because I want her ladyship to reach Clarehaven before dark." The chauffeur touched his cap, and the car answered generously to his efforts in spite of continual criticisms leveled against it by the owner. "We must get a Lee-Lonsdale," he said to his wife. "That would be very nice for Lonnie," she agreed. "Mine, of course, was more a car for town. So I sold it." She did not add that her own Lee-Lonsdale had provided her with a bracelet of rubies. "The setting is new," she had said to Tony when she showed him this heirloom. "But the stones are old." And who should have contradicted her?