“Certainly.  She’s a Mrs. Stroope.”

“Mrs.?” queried Jerton.

“Yes, she’s the Lady Champion at golf in my part of the world.  An awful good sort, and goes about a good deal in Society, but she has an awkward habit of losing her memory every now and then, and gets into all sorts of fixes.  She’s furious, too, if you make any allusion to it afterwards.  Good day, sir.”

The stranger passed on his way, and before Jerton had had time to assimilate his information he found his whole attention centred on an angry-looking lady who was making loud and fretful-seeming inquiries of the hotel clerks.

“Has any luggage been brought here from the station by mistake, a dress-basket and dressing-case, with the name Kestrel-Smith?  It can’t be traced anywhere.  I saw it put in at Victoria, that I’ll swear.  Why—­there is my luggage! and the locks have been tampered with!”

Jerton heard no more.  He fled down to the Turkish bath, and stayed there for hours.

THE STALLED OX

Theophil Eshley was an artist by profession, a cattle painter by force of environment.  It is not to be supposed that he lived on a ranche or a dairy farm, in an atmosphere pervaded with horn and hoof, milking-stool, and branding-iron.  His home was in a park-like, villa-dotted district that only just escaped the reproach of being suburban.  On one side of his garden there abutted a small, picturesque meadow, in which an enterprising neighbour pastured some small picturesque cows of the Channel Island persuasion.  At noonday in summertime the cows stood knee-deep in tall meadow-grass under the shade of a group of walnut trees, with the sunlight falling in dappled patches on their mouse-sleek coats.  Eshley had conceived and executed a dainty picture of two reposeful milch-cows in a setting of walnut tree and meadow-grass and filtered sunbeam, and the Royal Academy had duly exposed the same on the walls of its Summer Exhibition.  The Royal Academy encourages orderly, methodical habits in its children.  Eshley had painted a successful and acceptable picture of cattle drowsing picturesquely under walnut trees, and as he had begun, so, of necessity, he went on.  His “Noontide Peace,” a study of two dun cows under a walnut tree, was followed by “A Mid-day Sanctuary,” a study of a walnut tree, with two dun cows under it.  In due succession there came “Where the Gad-Flies Cease from Troubling,” “The Haven of the Herd,” and “A-dream in Dairyland,” studies of walnut trees and dun cows.  His two attempts to break away from his own tradition were signal failures:  “Turtle Doves alarmed by Sparrow-hawk” and “Wolves on the Roman Campagna” came back to his studio in the guise of abominable heresies, and Eshley climbed back into grace and the public gaze with “A Shaded Nook where Drowsy Milkers Dream.”

On a fine afternoon in late autumn he was putting some finishing touches to a study of meadow weeds when his neighbour, Adela Pingsford, assailed the outer door of his studio with loud peremptory knockings.