But her heart was heavy with she knew not what forebodings. She could not see Alexis, who was seated on the same side and at the other end of the long table. She felt as though the benevolent gold-spectacled man had deliberately convened an assembly of Alexis’s enemies. It was a blessed relief when the ladies rose and left the men; but in the drawing-room, although she was talking to Lady Aintree, most winningly gracious of women, her glance continuously sought the door by which the men would enter. And when they came in his glance, for the first time in their married life, did not seek or meet hers. She scanned his face anxiously. It was pale and drawn, she thought, and into his eyes had crept the furtive look of a year ago which happiness, she thought, had dispelled for ever. He did not come near her; nor did Wedderburn and Onslow; nor did the two latter talk to him; he was swallowed up in a little group at the further end of the room. Meanwhile, the most up-to-date thing in bishops sank smilingly into a chair by her side, and ridden by some ironical Imp of the Inapposite described to her a visit, in the years past, to the Castle of Schwöbbe in Hanover, where dwelt the Baron von Munchausen, the lineal descendant of the famous liar. A mythical personage? Not a bit. Munchausen was one of Frederick the Great’s generals. He had seen his full-length portrait in the Rittersaal of the old Schloss. Thence he began to discourse on the great liars of travel. Herodotus, who was coming more and more into his own as a faithful historian; John Mandeville; Fernando Mendez Pinto, a name now forgotten, but for a couple of centuries a byword of mendacity; Gemelli Carreri, the bed-ridden Neapolitan author of a _Voyage Round the World_; the Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela who claimed to have ridden a hippogriff to the tomb of Ezekiel; George Psalmanazar, who captivated all London (including so level-headed a man as Samuel Johnson) with his history of the Island of Formosa and his grammar of the Formosan language; de Rougemont, the turtle-riding impostor of recent years; and the later unfortunate gentleman whose claim to have discovered the North Pole was so shockingly discredited. The bishop seemed to have made a hobby of these perverters of truth and to look on them (as in theological duty bound), wriggling through the lake of fire and brimstone, in the light of Izaak Walton’s counsel concerning the worms threaded on the hook, as if he loved them. Then there were the notorious Blank and Dash and Dot, still living. Types, said he, of the defective criminal mind, by mere chance skirting round the commonly recognized area of crime. Olivia, with nerves on edge, welcomed the matronly swoop of Mrs. Rowington. “My dear Bishop, I want to introduce you——” He rose, made a courtly bow to Olivia. “I’ll read your lordship’s next book of travel with great interest,” she said. * * * * * As the home-bound taxi drove off: