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“The other person carries the contradictory name of Stephen Pride.”

“Why does he continually finger his face, and show his emotions so? He assents to everything said to him by an appreciative exercise of his features.”

“My dear, you ask a great and solemn question. Let me introduce the young man, that you may get your answer at the fountain-head.”

“Wait a moment, Duke. Sit down and tell me when and where you met these men, and why you have continued the acquaintance.”

“Molly,” he said, obeying her, “you are a terrible inquisitor, and the privacy of one’s chamber were the kinder place to call one to account. But I bend to your implacability…. Mr. Vandewaters, like myself, has a taste for roving, though our aims are not identical. He has a fine faculty for uniting business and pleasure. He is not a thorough sportsman–there is always a certain amount of enthusiasm, even in the unrewarded patience of the true hunter; but he sufficeth. Well, Mr. Vandewaters had been hunting in the far north, and looking after a promising mine at the same time. He was on his way south at one angle, I at another angle, bound for the same point. Shon McGann was with me; Pierre with Vandewaters. McGann left me, at a certain point, to join his wife at a Barracks of the Riders of the Plains. I had about a hundred miles to travel alone. Well, I got along the first fifty all right. Then came trouble. In a bad place of the hills I fell and broke an ankle bone. I had an Eskimo dog of the right sort with me. I wrote a line on a bit of birch bark, tied it round his neck, and started him away, trusting my luck that he would pull up somewhere. He did. He ran into Vandewaters’s camp that evening. Vandewaters and Pierre started away at once. They had dogs, and reached me soon.

“It was the first time I had seen Pierre for years. They fixed me up, and we started south. And that’s as it was in the beginning with Mr. John Vandewaters and me.”

Lady Lawless had been watching the two strangers during the talk, though once or twice she turned and looked at her husband admiringly. When he had finished she said: “That is very striking. What a pity it is that men we want to like spoil all by their lack of form!”

“Don’t be so sure about Vandewaters. Does he look flurried by these surroundings?”

“No. He certainly has an air of contentment. It is, I suppose, the usual air of self-made Americans.”

“Go to London, E.C., and you will find the same, plus smugness. Now, Mr. Vandewaters has real power–and taste too, as you will see. Would you think Mr. Stephen Pride a self-made man?”

“I cannot think of any one else who would be proud of the patent. Please to consider the seals about his waistcoat, and the lady-like droop of his shoulders.”

“Yet he is thought to be a young man of parts. He has money, made by his ancestors; he has been round the world; he belongs to societies for culture and–“

“And he will rave of the Poet’s Corner, ask if one likes Pippa Passes, and expect to be introduced to every woman in the room at a tea-party, to say nothing of proposing impossible things, such as taking one’s girl friends to the opera alone, sending them boxes of confectionery, and writing them dreadfully reverential notes at the same time. Duke, the creature is impossible, believe me. Never, never, if you love me, invite him to Craigruie. I met one of his tribe at Lady Macintyre’s when I was just out of school; and at the dinner-table, when the wine went round, he lifted his voice and asked for a cup of tea, saying he never ‘drank.’ Actually he did, Duke.”

Her husband laughed quietly. He had a man’s enjoyment of a woman’s dislike of bad form. “A common criminal man, Molly. Tell me, which is the greater crime: to rob a bank or use a fish-knife for asparagus?”