and went back to his own group. Carstairs dropped limply into a chair and rang a bell.

“God, what a mob! And what a day! I haven’t had a moment to myself. The horrors of peace!”

His wife pressed his hand sympathetically, and the gold of a new wedding-ring caught and flung back the light from the great arc-lamps.

“Could you do anything about our passages?” she asked.

“Yes, I wandered into the chancery and got them to make up a bag. After that there was no difficulty, but the boat will be ankle-deep in Ministry of Munitions people and Treasury people and Propaganda people. There are more English officials than Americans in New York to-day. Precious glad every one will be to get rid of us! By the way, Sadler Long wants to give us a farewell dinner at the Biltmore; I said you weren’t doing anything. Was that all right?”

“Is it to-night?”

“No. We’re dining with Grant to-night at the Plaza. It’s a farewell dinner to Eric Lane, the dramatist fellow. The great American people will be both tired and dyspeptic by the time it’s given a farewell dinner to every munition-contractor, exchange-stabilizer and itinerant lecturer in the country.”

“I want to meet Mr. Lane,” said Lady John.

“Well, you’ll have every opportunity on the boat. I can’t say I do.”

A waiter came to their table with two cocktails. Carstairs signed for them, lighted a cigarette and leaned back with one leg thrown over the other. On the far side of the serried palm-tubs and wicker chairs, an English voice said:

“Waiter! I ordered a Number Twenty-Three.”

“Number Twenty-Three,” repeated the waiter, turning his head for an instant in full flight.

Eric Lane nodded and pretended to read his paper, refusing to be driven from a comfortable chair because a strange Englishman, with the notorious tact of the English, chose to discuss him by name at two yards’ distance. Until three minutes before, he had been agreeably lulled by the high hum of American voices; but this drawling English, with a hint of impatient superiority in it, assailed and defeated him. He was also humanly curious to know what the strange Englishman had heard or thought about him.

“I like his plays,” said Lady John. “Is there anything against him?”

Lane decided that she must be a New Englander. Then he recalled his glimpse of the underhung, impatient Englishman and remembered that Frances Naylor of Boston had married Lord John Carstairs six months earlier. The match had caused nearly a week’s excitement, for Carstairs was brother and heir-presumptive to the imbecile Duke of Ross, while Frances Naylor was a future heiress and a present beauty.

“Oh, I’ve no objection to him personally,” said Carstairs. “But I don’t suppose we’re very popular with him as a family. There was a blighted romance between him and my cousin, Barbara Neave.” He laughed, and Eric Lane felt his cheeks warming. “I’m afraid you’ll find Barbara—and her relicts and reputation—rather a mouthful.”

Not for the first time Frances Carstairs wished that the English had fewer relations. She had been bewilderingly initiated into the complex family tangle of the Neaves and Lorings, the Carstairs and Knightriders; John had drawn her ingenious plans to shew who had married whom, but every new name impaled her on a new genealogical tree, so that she openly dreaded her arrival in England and the threatened tour of inspection among her husband’s manifold connections.

“But I thought you told me your cousin had married recently,” she said.

“Yes, she married George Oakleigh. He was a son of Miles Oakleigh, the head of the family; and his cousin, Violet Hunter-Oakleigh, who’s of the Catholic branch in the county Dublin, married my cousin, Jim Loring, who was killed in ’15. I know it’s confusing at first——”

“It’s maddening! What has all this to do with Mr. Lane? If your cousin—our cousin——”

“Oh, that’s all over, but he may feel she made rather a fool of him. However, he’s in good company: when she was seventeen, I was supposed to be engaged to her, and Crawleigh had to contradict it in the press; and, to my knowledge, she’s been married off to six people in as many years, beginning with one of the young princes and ending with some barrister. She’s all right if you don’t take her seriously, but I’m told that Lane did, rather. She tried to drive him in double harness with the barrister until they both bolted in opposite directions; then Lane came out here, and the other man, Waring, quietly retired to the country; then she married George Oakleigh. And that’s the end of Barbara.”

Lady John felt that a criticism was expected of her, but could not decide how far it was safe to disapprove of her celebrated new cousin without incurring a charge of provincialism.

“Well, she had her fair share of romance,” she ventured after a pause. “I should think you’re all rather relieved.”

“The Crawleighs were a bit disappointed,” answered Carstairs; “but it might have been worse. Relieved? I don’t know. When I said that was the end of Barbara... There’s a curious little group that my cousin Jim Loring used to call “the Sensationalists”; they were always playing a part and pulling up their psychology by the roots to see how it was growing. Anything for a new emotion! Barbara always had more personality than the rest of them put together and she led them till she really made London too hot to hold her. Then the war came. The men were killed off and the women married; but the old Adam’s still alive in some of them. I’m wondering what Barbara’s next outbreak will be; she had one emotion by marrying a tame-cat Irish squireen, but how long she’ll stick to him... I’m sure we’ve not finished with her yet. You’ll find London a curious place... Look here, if we’re going to be in time, I must go up; I haven’t unpacked yet.”

At the creak of chairs, Eric Lane buried himself in his paper, only looking up when the bull-necked, consequential young man and his lithe, decorative companion had sauntered languorously past, leaving in his nostrils an elusive hint of violets and in his memory a dissolving view of pearls, a gold bag, white gloves, a cloak tentatively martial and exquisitely neat shoes. Lady John he had never seen before; Carstairs he now remembered as a young man with too much chin and too little hair, intermittently to be found in London theatres; they had overlapped for a year or two at Oxford where Carstairs won a brief notoriety by removing the minute hand of the General Post Office clock every Sunday night throughout one term; twelve years in the diplomatic service had robbed him of irresponsibility without putting anything in its place. As they disappeared from sight, Eric threw his paper away and lighted a cigar. After long months of solitude, it was stimulating to hear how the world represented by Carstairs summarized and dismissed his contribution to the romantic Odyssey of Lady Barbara Neave.

He had not, himself, been able to dismiss it so easily; and, when he left England at the end of 1916, Eric was determined never to come back. His health was shattered; Dr. Gaisford bluntly threatened him with a sanatorium; and he needed distance and change of work to heal a bruised spirit. After lecturing in the United States, he travelled for six months in