“Are you Lord Marshmoreton?”

“I am.”

“Good Lord!”

“You seem surprised.”

“It’s nothing!” muttered George.  “At least, you—­I mean to say . . .  It’s only that there’s a curious resemblance between you and one of your gardeners at the castle.  I—­I daresay you have noticed it yourself.”

“My hobby is gardening.”

Light broke upon George.  “Then was it really you—?”

“It was!”

George sat down.  “This opens up a new line of thought!” he said.

Lord Marshmoreton remained standing.  He shook his head sternly.

“It won’t do, Mr. . . .  I have never heard your name.”

“Bevan,” replied George, rather relieved at being able to remember it in the midst of his mental turmoil.

“It won’t do, Mr. Bevan.  It must stop.  I allude to this absurd entanglement between yourself and my daughter.  It must stop at once.”

It seemed to George that such an entanglement could hardly be said to have begun, but he did not say so.

Lord Marshmoreton resumed his remarks.  Lady Caroline had sent him to the cottage to be stern, and his firm resolve to be stern lent his style of speech something of the measured solemnity and careful phrasing of his occasional orations in the House of Lords.

“I have no wish to be unduly hard upon the indiscretions of Youth.  Youth is the period of Romance, when the heart rules the head.  I myself was once a young man.”

“Well, you’re practically that now,” said George.

“Eh?” cried Lord Marshmoreton, forgetting the thread of his discourse in the shock of pleased surprise.

“You don’t look a day over forty.”

“Oh, come, come, my boy! . . .  I mean, Mr. Bevan.”

“You don’t honestly.”

“I’m forty-eight.”

“The Prime of Life.”

“And you don’t think I look it?”

“You certainly don’t.”

“Well, well, well!  By the way, have you tobacco, my boy.  I came without my pouch.”

“Just at your elbow.  Pretty good stuff.  I bought it in the village.”

“The same I smoke myself.”

“Quite a coincidence.”

“Distinctly.”

“Match?”

“Thank you, I have one.”

George filled his own pipe.  The thing was becoming a love-feast.

“What was I saying?” said Lord Marshmoreton, blowing a comfortable cloud.  “Oh, yes.”  He removed his pipe from his mouth with a touch of embarrassment.  “Yes, yes, to be sure!”

There was an awkward silence.

“You must see for yourself,” said the earl, “how impossible it is.”

George shook his head.

“I may be slow at grasping a thing, but I’m bound to say I can’t see that.”

Lord Marshmoreton recalled some of the things his sister had told him to say.  “For one thing, what do we know of you?  You are a perfect stranger.”