Caroline, Duchess of Worcester, sat perfectly still for a moment with her mouth open, a condition which was entirely natural but unbecoming.

“And you mean to tell me that you really are Everard Dominey?” she exclaimed.

“The weight of evidence is rather that way,” he murmured.

He moved his chair deliberately a little nearer, took her hand and raised it to his lips.  Her face was perilously near to his.  She drew a little back—­and too abruptly.

“My dear Everard,” she whispered, “Henry is in the house!  Besides—­Yes, I suppose you must be Everard.  Just now there was something in your eyes exactly like his.  But you are so stiff.  Have you been drilling out there or anything?”

He shook his head.

“One spends half one’s time in the saddle.”

“And you are really well off?” she asked again wonderingly.

“If I had stayed there another year,” he replied, “and been able to marry a Dutch Jewess, I should have qualified for Park Lane.”

She sighed.

“It’s too wonderful.  Henry will love having his money back.”

“And you?”

She looked positively distressed.

“You’ve lost all your manners,” she complained.  “You make love like a garden rake.  You should have leaned towards me with a quiver in your voice when you said those last two words, and instead of that you look as though you were sitting at attention, with a positive glint of steel in your eyes.”

“One sees a woman once in a blue moon out there,” he pleaded.

She shook her head.  “You’ve changed.  It was a sixth sense with you to make love in exactly the right tone, to say exactly the right thing in the right manner.”

“I shall pick it up,” he declared hopefully, “with a little assistance.”

She made a little grimace.

“You won’t want an old woman like me to assist you, Everard.  You’ll have the town at your feet.  You’ll be able to frivol with musical comedy, flirt with our married beauties, or—­I’m sorry, Everard, I forgot.”

“You forgot what?” he asked steadfastly.

“I forgot the tragedy which finally drove you abroad.  I forgot your marriage.  Is there any change in your wife?”

“Not much, I am afraid.”

“And Mr. Mangan—­he thinks that you are safe over here?”

“Perfectly.”

She looked at him earnestly.  Perhaps she had never admitted, even to herself, how fond she had been of this scapegrace cousin.

“You’ll find that no one will have a word to say against you,” she told him, “now that you are wealthy and regenerate.  They’ll forget everything you want them to.  When will you come and dine here and meet all your relatives?”

“Whenever you are kind enough to ask me,” he answered.  “I thought of going down to Dominey to-morrow.”

She looked at him with a new thing in her eyes—­something of fear, something, too, of admiration.