of himself only seldom. It was marvelous how often he seemed to avoid the use of the first person. He seemed, too, modestly unconscious of the fact that his conversation was in any way more interesting than the speech of those by whom he was surrounded.

“You seem to have lived,” his hostess said to him once, “in so many countries, Mr. Saton. Are you really only as old as you look?”

“How can I answer that,” he asked, smiling, “except by telling you that I am twenty-five.”

“You must have commenced to live in your perambulator,” she declared.

“I have lived nowhere,” he answered. “I have visited many places, and travelled through many lands, but life with me has been a search.”

“A search?” she murmured, dropping her voice a little, and intimating by the slight movement of her head towards him, that their conversation was to become a tête-á-tête. “Well,” she continued, “I suppose that life is that with all of us, only you see with us poor frivolous people, a search means nearly always the same thing—a search for amusement or distraction, whichever you choose to call it.”

Saton shrugged his shoulders slightly.

“Different things amuse different people,” he remarked. “My search, I will admit, was of a different order.”

“It is finished?” she asked.

“It will never be finished,” he answered. “The man who finds what he seeks,” he added, raising his dark eyes to hers, “as a rule has fixed his ambitions too low.”

“Speaking of ambitions, Mr. Saton,” Lord Penarvon asked across the table, “are you interested in politics?”

“Not in the least,” Saton answered frankly. “There seem to me to be so many other things in life better worth doing than making fugitive laws for a dissatisfied country.”

“Tell me,” his hostess asked, “what do you yourself consider the things better worth doing?”

Saton hesitated. For the first time, he seemed scarcely at his ease. He glanced across at Rochester, and down at his plate.

“The sciences,” he answered, quietly. “There are many torches lit which need strong hands to carry them forward.”

Lois leaned across the table. As yet she had scarcely spoken, but she had listened intently to his every word.

“Which of the sciences, Mr. Saton?” she asked, a little breathlessly.

He smiled at her, and hesitated a moment before answering.

“There are so many,” he said, “which are equally fascinating, but I think that it is always the least known which is the most attractive. When I spoke, I was really thinking of one which many people would scarcely reckon amongst the orthodox list. I mean occultism.”

There was a little murmur of interest. Saton himself, however, deliberately turned the conversation. He reverted to a diplomatic incident which had come to his notice when in Brazil, and asked Lord Penarvon’s opinion concerning it.

“By the bye,” the latter asked, as their conversation drew toward a close, “how long did you say that you had been in England, Mr. Saton?”

“A very short time,” Saton answered, with a faint smile. “I have been something of a wanderer for years.”

“And you came from?” Rochester asked, leaning a little forward.

Saton smiled as his eyes met his host’s. He hesitated perceptibly.

“I came from the land where the impossible sometimes happens,” he answered, lightly, “the land where one dreams in the evening, and is never sure when one wakes in the morning that one’s dreams have not become solid things.”

Lady Mary sighed.

“Can one get a Cook’s ticket?” she asked.

“Can one get there by motor-car, or even flying-machine?” Lois demanded. “I would risk my bones to find my way there.”

Saton laughed.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “there is a different path for every one of us, and there are no signposts.”

Lady Mary sighed as she rose to her feet. She nodded a friendly little farewell to her interesting neighbor.

“Then we may as well go and have some really good bridge,” she said, “until you men take it into your heads to come and disturb us.”