skillfully aimed glances fell harmless, even unheeded, upon his
impenetrable armor. He might have married wherever he had willed, but
Society and her fair votaries sighed and smiled in vain, and finally
decided to leave him alone, to Verdayne's infinite relief.

As for the Boy, he was always, as I have said, a mystery, always a topic
for the consideration of the gossips. Every year since he was a little
fellow six years old he had come to Verdayne Place for the summer; at
first, accompanied by his nurse, Anna, and a silver-haired servant,
curiously named Dmitry. Later the nurse had ceased to be a necessity,
and the old servant had been replaced by Vasili, a younger, but no less
devoted attendant. As the Boy grew older, he had learned to hunt and
took long rides with his then youthful host across the wide stretch of
English country that made up the Verdayne estates and those of the
neighboring gentry. Often they cruised about in distant waters, for the
young fellow from his earliest years shared with the elder an absorbing
love of nature in all her varied and glorious forms; and in February,
always in February, Verdayne found time to steal away from England for a
brief visit to that far-off country in the south of Europe from which
the Boy came. Many remembered that Verdayne, like an uncle of his, Lord
Hubert Aldringham, had been much given to foreign travel in his younger
days and had made many friends and acquaintances among the nobility and
royalty of other lands, and although it was strange, they thought it was
not at all improbable that the lad was connected with some one of those
great families across the Channel.

As for Paul and the Boy, they knew not what people thought or said, and
cared still less. There was too strong a bond of _camaraderie_ between
them to be disturbed by the murmurings of a wind that could blow neither
of them good or ill.