no telling how low she might have sunk, had it not entered her head one day to set her cap for the unsuspecting Mr. Saunders.  She had learned, in the wisdom of her sex, that he was fancy free.  Mr. Saunders, fully warned against the American typewriter girl as a class, having read the most shocking jokes at her expense in the comic papers, was rather shy at the outset, but Britt gallantly came to Miss Pelham’s defence and ultimate rescue by emphatically assuring Saunders that she was a perfect lady, guaranteed to cause uneasiness to no man’s wife.

“But I have no wife,” quickly protested Saunders, turning a dull red.

“The devil!” exclaimed Britt, apparently much upset by the revelation.

But of this more anon.

* * * * *

Browne conducted the two young women across the drawbridge and to the sunlit edge of the terrace, where two servants awaited them with parasols.

“Isn’t it extraordinary, the trouble one is willing to take for the merest glimpse of a man?” sighed Lady Agnes.  “At home we try to avoid them.”

“Indeed?” said pretty Mrs. Browne, with a slight touch of irony.  It was the first sign of the gentle warfare which their wits were to wage.

“There he is!  See him?” almost whispered Browne, as if the solitary, motionless figure at the foot of the avenue was likely to hear his voice and be frightened away.

The Enemy was sitting serenely on one of the broad iron benches just inside the gates to the park, his arms stretched out along the back, his legs extended and crossed.  The great stone wall behind him afforded shelter from the broiling sun; satinwood trees lent an appearance of coolness that did not exist, if one were to judge by the absence of hat and the fact that his soft shirt was open at the throat.  He was not more than two hundred yards away from the clump of trees which screened his watchers from view.  If he caught an occasional glimpse of dainty blue and white fabrics, he made no demonstration of interest or acknowledgment.  It was quite apparent that he was lazily surveying the chateau, puffing with consistent ease at the cigarette which drooped from his lips.  His long figure was attired in light grey flannels; one could not see the stripe at that distance, yet one could not help feeling that it existed—­a slim black stripe, if any one should have asked.

“Quite at home,” murmured her ladyship, which was enough to show that she excused the intruder on the ground that he was an American.

“Mr. Britt was right,” said Mrs. Browne irrelevantly.  She was peering at the stranger through the binoculars.  “He is very good-looking.”

“And you from Boston, too,” scoffed Lady Deppingham.  Mrs. Browne flushed, and smiled deprecatingly.

“Wonder what he’s doing here in the grounds?” puzzled Browne.

“It’s plain to me that he is resting his audacious bones,” said her ladyship, glancing brightly at her co-legatee.  The latter’s wife, in a sudden huff, deliberately left them, crossing the macadam driveway in plain view of the stranger.