Ann laughed.

“It’s not my fault that I have red hair, uncle Peter.  It’s my misfortune.”

Mr. Pett shook his head.

“Other people’s misfortune, too!” he said.

CHAPTER II

THE EXILED FAN

London brooded under a grey sky.  There had been rain in the night, and the trees were still dripping.  Presently, however, there appeared in the laden haze a watery patch of blue:  and through this crevice in the clouds the sun, diffidently at first but with gradually increasing confidence, peeped down on the fashionable and exclusive turf of Grosvenor Square.  Stealing across the square, its rays reached the massive stone walls of Drexdale House, until recently the London residence of the earl of that name; then, passing through the window of the breakfast-room, played lightly on the partially bald head of Mr. Bingley Crocker, late of New York in the United States of America, as he bent over his morning paper.  Mrs. Bingley Crocker, busy across the table reading her mail, the rays did not touch.  Had they done so, she would have rung for Bayliss, the butler, to come and lower the shade, for she endured liberties neither from Man nor from Nature.

Mr. Crocker was about fifty years of age, clean-shaven and of a comfortable stoutness.  He was frowning as he read.  His smooth, good-humoured face wore an expression which might have been disgust, perplexity, or a blend of both.  His wife, on the other hand, was looking happy.  She extracted the substance from her correspondence with swift glances of her compelling eyes, just as she would have extracted guilty secrets from Bingley, if he had had any.  This was a woman who, like her sister Nesta, had been able all her life to accomplish more with a glance than other women with recrimination and threat.  It had been a popular belief among his friends that her late husband, the well-known Pittsburg millionaire G. G. van Brunt, had been in the habit of automatically confessing all if he merely caught the eye of her photograph on his dressing table.

From the growing pile of opened envelopes Mrs. Crocker looked up, a smile softening the firm line of her lips.

“A card from Lady Corstorphine, Bingley, for her at-home on the twenty-ninth.”

Mr. Crocker, still absorbed, snorted absently.

“One of the most exclusive hostesses in England. . . .  She has influence with the right sort of people.  Her brother, the Duke of Devizes, is the Premier’s oldest friend.”

“Uh?”

“The Duchess of Axminster has written to ask me to look after a stall at her bazaar for the Indigent Daughters of the Clergy.”

“Huh?”

“Bingley!  You aren’t listening.  What is that you are reading?”

Mr. Crocker tore himself from the paper.

“This?  Oh, I was looking at a report of that cricket game you made me go and see yesterday.”