“Well, Miss Vanderpoel,” he explained, “I was lying here thinking of Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, and how well they treated me—­I haven’t told you about that, have I?

“That explains what Mrs. Buttle said,” she answered.  “When you were delirious you talked frequently to Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance.  We both wondered why.”

Then he told her the whole story.  Beginning with his sitting on the grassy bank outside the park, listening to the song of the robin, he ended with the adieux at the entrance gates when the sound of her horse’s trotting hoofs had been heard by each of them.

“What I’ve been lying here thinking of,” he said, “is how queer it was it happened just that way.  If I hadn’t stopped just that minute, and if you hadn’t gone by, and if Lord Mount Dunstan hadn’t known you and said who you were, Little Willie would have been in London by this time, hustling to get a cheap bunk back to New York in.”

“Because?” inquired Miss Vanderpoel.

G. Selden laughed and hesitated a moment.  Then he made a clean breast of it.

“Say, Miss Vanderpoel,” he said, “I hope it won’t make you mad if I own up.  Ladies like you don’t know anything about chaps like me.  On the square and straight out, when I seen you and heard your name I couldn’t help remembering whose daughter you was.  Reuben S. Vanderpoel spells a big thing.  Why, when I was in New York we fellows used to get together and talk about what it’d mean to the chap who could get next to Reuben S. Vanderpoel.  We used to count up all the business he does, and all the clerks he’s got under him pounding away on typewriters, and how they’d be bound to get worn out and need new ones.  And we’d make calculations how many a man could unload, if he could get next.  It was a kind of typewriting junior assistant fairy story, and we knew it couldn’t happen really.  But we used to chin about it just for the fun of the thing.  One of the boys made up a thing about one of us saving Reuben S.’s life—­dragging him from under a runaway auto and, when he says, ’What can I do to show my gratitude, young man?’ him handing out his catalogue and saying, ‘I should like to call your attention to the Delkoff, sir,’ and getting him to promise he’d never use any other, as long as he lived!”

Reuben S. Vanderpoel’s daughter laughed as spontaneously as any girl might have done.  G. Selden laughed with her.  At any rate, she hadn’t got mad, so far.

“That was what did it,” he went on.  “When I rode away on my bike I got thinking about it and could not get it out of my head.  The next day I just stopped on the road and got off my wheel, and I says to myself:  ’Look here, business is business, if you are travelling in Europe and lunching at Buckingham Palace with the main squeeze.  Get busy!  What’ll the boys say if they hear you’ve missed a chance like this?  You hit the pike for Stornham Castle, or whatever it’s called, and take your