“Yes.  Keggs, there are a number of outside men helping here tonight, aren’t there?”

“Indubitably, your lordship.  The unprecedented scale of the entertainment necessitated the engagement of a certain number of supernumeraries,” replied Keggs with an easy fluency which Reggie Byng, now cooling his head on the lower terrace, would have bitterly envied.  “In the circumstances, such an arrangement was inevitable.”

“You engaged all these men yourself?”

“In a manner of speaking, your lordship, and for all practical purposes, yes.  Mrs. Digby, the ’ouse-keeper conducted the actual negotiations in many cases, but the arrangement was in no instance considered complete until I had passed each applicant.”

“Do you know anything of an American who says he is the cousin of the page-boy?”

“The boy Albert did introduce a nominee whom he stated to be ’is cousin ’ome from New York on a visit and anxious to oblige.  I trust he ’as given no dissatisfaction, your lordship?  He seemed a respectable young man.”

“No, no, not at all.  I merely wished to know if you knew him.  One can’t be too careful.”

“No, indeed, your lordship.”

“That’s all, then.”

“Thank you, your lordship.”

Lord Belpher was satisfied.  He was also relieved.  He felt that prudence and a steady head had kept him from making himself ridiculous.  When George presently returned with the life-saving fluid, he thanked him and turned his thoughts to other things.

But, if the young master was satisfied, Keggs was not.  Upon Keggs a bright light had shone.  There were few men, he flattered himself, who could more readily put two and two together and bring the sum to a correct answer.  Keggs knew of the strange American gentleman who had taken up his abode at the cottage down by Platt’s farm.  His looks, his habits, and his motives for coming there had formed food for discussion throughout one meal in the servant’s hall; a stranger whose abstention from brush and palette showed him to be no artist being an object of interest.  And while the solution put forward by a romantic lady’s-maid, a great reader of novelettes, that the young man had come there to cure himself of some unhappy passion by communing with nature, had been scoffed at by the company, Keggs had not been so sure that there might not be something in it.  Later events had deepened his suspicion, which now, after this interview with Lord Belpher, had become certainty.

The extreme fishiness of Albert’s sudden production of a cousin from America was so manifest that only his preoccupation at the moment when he met the young man could have prevented him seeing it before.  His knowledge of Albert told him that, if one so versed as that youth in the art of Swank had really possessed a cousin in America, he would long ago have been boring the servants’ hall with fictions about the man’s wealth and importance.  For Albert not to lie about a thing, practically proved that thing non-existent.  Such was the simple creed of Keggs.