When he went forth to ride the next day it was with a purpose clear in his mind.  Hitherto all he had seen or heard had been by chance, but if he saw aught this morning ’twould be because he had hoped for and gone to meet it.

“Before I cross the sea,” was his thought, “I would see her once again if chance so favors me.  I would see if there seems any new thing in her face, and if there is—­if this is no wild jest and comedy, but means that she has wakened to knowing herself a woman—­I shall know when I see her eyes and can carry my thought away with me.  Then when I come back—­’twill be but a few months at the most—­I will ride into Gloucestershire the first week I am on English soil, and I will go to her and ask that I may be her servant until she learns what manner of man I am and can tell me to go—­or stay.”

If Sir Jeoffry and his crew had dreamed that such a thought worked in the mind of one of the richest young noblemen in England—­he a Duke and handsome enough to set any woman’s heart beating—­as he rode through the Gloucestershire lanes; if they had dreamed that such a thing was within the bounds of human possibility, what a tumult would have been roused among them; how they would have stared at each other, with mouths open, uttering exclamatory oaths of wild amazement and ecstatic triumph; how they would have exulted and drunk each other’s healths and their wild playmate’s and her splendid fortunes.  But, in truth, that such a thing could be, would have seemed to them as likely as that Queen Anne herself should cast a gracious eye upon a poor, fox-hunting, country baronet who was one of her rustic subjects.  The riot of Wildairs and its company was a far cry indeed from Camylott and St. James.

If my Lord Twemlow had guessed at the possibility of the strange thing, and had found himself confronting a solution of his carking problem which would flood its past with brilliance and illuminate all its future with refulgent light, casting a glow of splendour even over his own plain country gentleman’s existence, how he would have started and flushed with bewildered pride and rubbed his periwig awry in his delighted excitement.  If my Lord Dunstanwolde, sitting at that hour in his silent library, a great book open before him, his forehead on his slender veined hand, his thoughts wandering far away, if he had been given by Fate an inkling of the truth which none knew or suspected, or had reason for suspecting, perhaps he would have been the most startled and struck dumb of all—­the most troubled and amazed and shocked.

But of such a thing no one dreamed, as, indeed, why should they, and my lord Duke of Osmonde rode over the border into Gloucestershire on his fine beast, and, trotting-up the roads and down the lanes, wore a look upon his face which showed him deep in thought.

’Twas a grey day, unbrightened by any sun.  For almost a week there had been rain, and the roads were heavy and the lanes muddy and full of pools of miry water.