“Well?”

“Do you know whom she mistook you for in the Carlton grill room?”

“Tell me?” he answered evasively.

“She mistook you for a Baron Leopold Von Ragastein,” Caroline continued drily.  “Von Ragastein was her lover in Hungary.  He fought a duel with her husband and killed him.  The Kaiser was furious and banished him to East Africa.”

Dominey picked up his shooting-stick and handed his gun to Middleton.  The beaters were through the wood.

“Yes, I remember now,” he said.  “She addressed me as Leopold.”

“I still don’t see why it was necessary to invite her here,” his companion observed a little petulantly.  “She may—­call you Leopold again!”

“If she does, I shall be deaf,” Dominey promised.  “But seriously, she is a cousin of the Princess Terniloff, and the two women are devoted to one another.  The Princess hates shooting parties, so I thought they could entertain one another.”

“Bosh!  Stephanie will monopolise you all the time!  That’s what’s she’s coming for.”

“You are not suggesting that she intends seriously to put me in the place of my double?” Dominey asked, with mock alarm.

“Oh, I shouldn’t wonder!  And she’s an extraordinarily attractive woman.  I’m full of complaints, Everard.  There’s that other horrible little man, Seaman.  You know that the very sight of him makes Henry furious.  I am quite sure that he never expected to sit down at the same table with him.”

“I am really sorry about that,” Dominey assured her, “but you see His Excellency takes a great interest in him on account of this Friendship League, of which Seaman is secretary, and he particularly asked to have him here.”

“Well, you must admit that the situation is a little awkward for Henry,” she complained.  “Next to Lord Roberts, Henry is practically the leader of the National Service movement here; he hates Germany and distrusts every German he ever met, and in a small house party like this we meet the German Ambassador and a man who is working hard to lull to sleep the very sentiments which Henry is endeavouring to arouse.”

“It sounds very pathetic,” Dominey admitted, with a smile, “but even Henry likes Terniloff, and after all it is stimulating to meet one’s opponents sometimes.”

“Of course he likes Terniloff,” Caroline assented, “but he hates the things he stands for.  However, I’d have forgiven you everything if only Stephanie weren’t coming.  That woman is really beginning to irritate me.  She always seems to be making mysterious references to some sentimental past in which you both are concerned, and for which there can be no foundation at all except your supposed likeness to her exiled lover.  Why, you never met her until that day at the Carlton!”

“She was a complete stranger to me,” Dominey asserted.

“Then all I can say is that you have been unusually rapid if you’ve managed to create a past in something under three months!” Caroline pronounced suspiciously.  “I call her coming here a most bare-faced proceeding, especially as this is practically a bachelor establishment.”