Mr. Penzance had invited him to spend a week at the vicarage.  He was to do this as soon as he could comfortably drive from the one place to the other.  After receiving the invitation he had sent secretly to London for one of the Delkoffs he had brought with him from America as a specimen.  He cherished in private a plan of gently entertaining his host by teaching him to use the machine.  The vicar would thus be prepared for that future in which surely a Delkoff must in some way fall into his hands.  Indeed, Fortune having at length cast an eye on himself, might chance to favour him further, and in time he might be able to send a “high-class machine” as a grateful gift to the vicarage.  Perhaps Mr. Penzance would accept it because he would understand what it meant of feeling and appreciation.

During the afternoon Lord Dunholm managed to talk a good deal with Mount Dunstan.  There was no air of intention in his manner, nevertheless intention was concealed beneath its courteous amiability.  He wanted to get at the man.  Before they parted he felt he had, perhaps, learned things opening up new points of view.

. . . . .

In the smoking-room at Dunholm that night he and his son talked of their chance encounter.  It seemed possible that mistakes had been made about Mount Dunstan.  One did not form a definite idea of a man’s character in the course of an afternoon, but he himself had been impressed by a conviction that there had been mistakes.

“We are rather a stiff-necked lot—­in the country—­when we allow ourselves to be taken possession of by an idea,” Westholt commented.

“I am not at all proud of the way in which we have taken things for granted,” was his father’s summing up.  “It is, perhaps, worth observing,” taking his cigar from his mouth and smiling at the end of it, as he removed the ash, “that, but for Miss Vanderpoel and G. Selden, we might never have had an opportunity of facing the fact that we may not have been giving fair play.  And one has prided one’s self on one’s fair play.”

CHAPTER XXX

A RETURN

At the close of a long, warm afternoon Betty Vanderpoel came out upon the square stone terrace overlooking the gardens, and that part of the park which, enclosing them, caused them, as they melted into its greenness, to lose all limitations and appear to be only a more blooming bit of the landscape.

Upon the garden Betty’s eyes dwelt, as she stood still for some minutes taking in their effect thoughtfully.

Kedgers had certainly accomplished much.  His close-trimmed lawns did him credit, his flower beds were flushed and azured, purpled and snowed with bloom.  Sweet tall spires, hung with blue or white or rosy flower bells, lifted their heads above the colour of lower growths.  Only the fervent affection, the fasting and prayer of a Kedgers could have done such wonders with new things and old.  The old