A Poached Peerage Part 56

"Ah," said Mr. Buffkin with provoking foolishness. "I dare say she prefers some one lively, and I don't blame her."

"But--but," urged Lady Ormstork, almost speechless with discomfiture, "do you call this person a good match?"

"I should say he matches her better than the lord," was the hopeless reply.

"That's right, father," observed Miss Buffkin.

Lady Ormstork turned and without another word went into the gallery, the others following at a safe distance.

The enlightenment of the Hemyock family as to the ident.i.ty of the real Lord Quorn had been, for obvious reasons, delayed by the parties most interested in keeping them in the dark. But now that the new-found peer was not to fall to Lady Ormstork's bag, that spiteful dowager determined to let the cat out of it.

"May I order my carriage, Lord Quorn?" she said in her most distinct and penetrating tones. "It is getting late."

As Quorn rose in his lumbering fas.h.i.+on and rang the bell, the Hemyock girls who had been gaily chattering to Gage became abruptly silent, and Lady Agatha looked stonily nonplussed.

"Lord Quorn?" she said, with a brave attempt at a successful smile.

"Surely this is not Lord Quorn?"

"I'm n.o.body else," Quorn a.s.sured her bluffly.

"How very singular," said Lady Ormstork icily, "that you should not have known it."

"Not at all," rejoined Lady Agatha promptly. "We have for weeks past understood this gentleman was Lord Quorn."

"I didn't like to contradict you," said Gage on being indicated.

Lady Agatha, for once too dumfounded for speech, could only give a significant look of appeal to her daughters. And at the look John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook, who had taken the precaution to get near the door, opened it quietly and slipped out.

Meanwhile the brown eyes of Miss Ethel and the black orbs of Miss Dagmar were fastened searchingly on Lord Quorn, and they transmitted to their owners the impression that he was not an attractive personage.

In truth there was yet a good deal of the Jenkins about him. His clothes looked as though he had been in the habit of going to bed in them, and his hair cried out for the barber. For the moment, at any rate, he was not to be jumped at, and with that conviction the original impulse to spring was stilled. Lady Agatha rose, with a lofty ignoring of Lady Ormstork's exultant smile.

"If," she said to Gage, "you are not Lord Quorn, as you have all along thought proper to pretend to be, may one ask who you are?"

"I am Peter Gage," he answered with a touch of amus.e.m.e.nt.

The eyes of Lady Agatha and her daughters met, and all that could be read in them was an indignant perplexity.

"It is all very extraordinary." Colonel Hemyock's thin voice sounded through the room, but his family heeded it not. Their minds were busy with the enigma of the position which was too complicated, not to say suspicious, to be comprehended at once. Only one thing in all the business seemed safe, and their minds jumped together to it. They recoiled, as by a single impulse, from the unattractive personality of Lord Quorn, from the doubtful individualities of Gage and Peckover, and their eyes by common consent sought the spot where their sheet-anchor had lately rested.

"Sharnbrook!"

"Where is he?"

They ran a dead heat to the door, charged through it, and so out into the garden. But John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook's start served him well, and he was at that moment sprinting homewards down the drive with a canny smile on his simple face.

Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London.

_WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR._

THE MASTER SPIRIT

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