name. Her father, the impoverished fourteenth Earl of Mountshire, and the
thirtieth Baron of something else, refused to sit among the canaille of the
present House of Peers. He bred shorthorns and Berkshire pigs, which he
disposed of profitably, and grew grapes and melons for Covent Garden, read
the lessons in church and wrote letters to the _Times_ about the war
on which the late Guy Earl of Warwick would have rather prided himself when
he took a fancy to make a King.

"The dear old idiot," said Lady Auriol. "He belongs to the time of
Nebuchadnezzar."

But, all the same, in spite of her flouting, her birth assured her a social
position from which she could be thrown by nothing less than outrageous
immorality or a Bolshevist revolution. That Lackaday, to whom the British
Peerage, in the ordinary way, was as closed a book as the Talmud,
realized her high estate I was perfectly aware. Dear and garrulous Lady
Verity-Stewart had given him at dinner the whole family history--she
herself was a Dayne--from the time of Henry I. I was sitting on the other
side of her and heard and amused myself by scanning the expressionless face
of Lackaday who listened as a strayed aviator might listen to the social
gossip of the inhabitants of Mars. Anyhow he left the table with the
impression that the Earl of Mountshire was the most powerful noble in
England and that his hostess and her cousin, Lady Auriol, regarded the
Royal Family as upstarts and only visited Buckingham Palace in order to set
a good example to the proletariat.

"I'm sure he does," said I, after summarizing Lady Verity-Stewart's
monologue.

"The family has been the curse of my life," said Auriol. "If I hadn't