“Right,” her grace nodded; “I’ll be on time, dearest.”

And Lady Galorey with a relieved sigh heard the door close behind the duchess. Wiping her fountain pen delicately with a bit of chamois, she murmured: “Well, Dan Blair is out of Eden, poor dear, if he met her by the gate.”

A fortune of a round ten million pounds was a small part of what this young man had come into by direct inheritance from the Copper King of Blairtown, Montana. For once the money figure had not been exaggerated, but Lady Galorey did not know about the rest of Dan’s inheritance.

The young man whistling in his rooms in the bachelor quarters of Osdene Park House, dressed for dinner without the aid of a valet. When Lord Galorey had asked him “where his manservant was,” Dan had grinned. “Gosh, I wouldn’t have one of those Johnnies hanging around me—never did have! I can put on my stockings all right! There was a chap on the boat I came over in who let his man put on his stockings. Can you beat that?” Blair had laughed again. “I think if anybody tickled my feet that way I would be likely to kick him in the eye.”

Dressing in his room he whistled under his breath a song from a newly popular comic opera; and he intoned with his clear young voice a line of the words:

“Should-you-go-to-Mandalay.”

Out through his high window, if he had looked, he would have seen the misty sweep of the park under the faint moonrise and fine shadows that the leaves made in the veiled light, but he did not look out. He was dressing for dinner without a valet and giving a great deal of care to his toilet; for the first time he was to dine in the house of a nobleman and in the presence of a duchess; not that it meant a great deal to him—he thought it was “funny.”

In Dan Blair’s twenty-two years of utterly happy days his one grief had been the death of his father. As soon as the old man had died Dan had gone off into the Rockies with his guides and not “shown up” for months. When he came back to Blairtown, as he expressed it, “he packed his grip and beat it while his shoes were good,” for the one place he could remember his father had suggested for him to go.

Blairtown was very much impressed when the heir came in from the Rockies with “a big kill,” and the orphan’s case did not seem especially disturbed. But no one in the town knew how the boy’s heart ached for the old man. When Dan was six years old his father had literally picked him up by the nape of his neck and thrown him into the water like a pup and watched him swim. At eight he sent the boy off with a gun to rough-camp. Then he took Dan down in the mines with the men. His education had been won in Blairtown, at a school called public, but which in reality was nothing more than a pioneer district school.

On Sundays Dan dressed up and went with his father to church twice a day and in the week-days his father took him to the prayer-meetings, and at sixteen Dan went to college in California. He had just completed his course when old Blair died. Then he inherited fifty million dollars.

On the day of the shoot at Osdene, Dan dropped sixty birds. He tried very hard not to be too pleased. “Gosh,” he thought to himself, “those birds fell as though they were trained all right, and the other sports were mad, I could see it.” He then fell to whistling softly the air he had heard Lady Galorey play the night before from the new success at the Gaiety, and finished it as his toilet completed itself. He took up a gardenia from his dressing-table, and fastened it in his coat, stopping on the stairs on the way down to look over into the hall, where the men in their black clothes and the women in their shining dresses waited before going