made up her mind to accept Lord Wisbeach, and had only deferred actual acceptance of him because in her cool way she wished to re-examine the position at her leisure.  Second thoughts had brought no revulsion of feeling.  She had not wavered until her arrival in New York.  Then, for some reason which baffled her, the idea of marrying Lord Wisbeach had become vaguely distasteful.  And now she found herself fluctuating between this mood and her former one.

She reached the house on Riverside Drive, but did not slacken the speed of the machine.  She knew that Lord Wisbeach would be waiting for her there, and she did not wish to meet him just yet.  She wanted to be alone.  She was feeling depressed.  She wondered if this was because she had just departed from her father, and decided that it was.  His swift entrances into and exits from her life always left her temporarily restless.  She drove on up the river.  She meant to decide her problem one way or the other before she returned home.

Lord Wisbeach, meanwhile, was talking to Mrs. Pett and Willie, its inventor, about Partridgite.  Willie, on hearing himself addressed, had turned slowly with an air of absent self-importance, the air of a great thinker disturbed in mid-thought.  He always looked like that when spoken to, and there were those—­Mr. Pett belonged to this school of thought—­who held that there was nothing to him beyond that look and that he had built up his reputation as a budding mastermind on a foundation that consisted entirely of a vacant eye, a mop of hair through which he could run his fingers, and the fame of his late father.

Willie Partridge was the son of the great inventor, Dwight Partridge, and it was generally understood that the explosive, Partridgite, was to be the result of a continuation of experiments which his father had been working upon at the time of his death.  That Dwight Partridge had been trying experiments in the direction of a new and powerful explosive during the last year of his life was common knowledge in those circles which are interested in such things.  Foreign governments were understood to have made tentative overtures to him.  But a sudden illness, ending fatally, had finished the budding career of Partridgite abruptly, and the world had thought no more of it until an interview in the Sunday Chronicle, that store-house of information about interesting people, announced that Willie was carrying on his father’s experiments at the point where he had left off.  Since then there had been vague rumours of possible sensational developments, which Willie had neither denied nor confirmed.  He preserved the mysterious silence which went so well with his appearance.

Having turned slowly so that his eyes rested on Lord Wisbeach’s ingenuous countenance, Willie paused, and his face assumed the expression of his photograph in the Chronicle.

“Ah, Wisbeach!” he said.

Lord Wisbeach did not appear to resent the patronage of his manner.  He plunged cheerily into talk.  He had a pleasant, simple way of comporting himself which made people like him.