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  'Begging your lordship's pardon, I don't hardly know how I can do so, being as the area-gate is chained and padlocked.' He observed, not without a certain satisfaction, that the Viscount, momentarily at least, was at a non-plus, and relented sufficiently to say that he would enquire at the neighbouring houses. But as one of these had been hired for the summer months by a family whom Stebbing disdainfully described as Proper Mushrooms, and who had no knowledge of Lord Nettlecombe; and the other by an elderly couple whose porter said, with a sniff, that he had seen the old hunks drive off about a week ago, but had no notion where he was going. 'My master and mistress don't have nothing to do with him, nor don't any of us in this house have nothing to do with his servants,' he stated loftily.

  When Stebbing returned to the curricle to report these dis couraging tidings, Miss Steane uttered in an anguished whisper: 'Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do?'

  'Shall I ask at any of the other houses, my lord?'

  But the Viscount had had time to think, and he replied: 'No. We have wasted enough time, and wherever his lordship may be we can scarcely hope to reach him today. Up with you!' He then turned his attention to his agitated passenger, and said with a cheerfulness he was far from feeling: 'Now, why are you shaking like a blancmanger, little pea-goose? To be sure, this mischance has cast a slight rub in our way, but the case isn't desperate, you know!' He set his horses in motion as he spoke, turning them round, and added, with a rueful laugh: 'Of course, if we discover that he is drinking the waters in Bath we shall be made to look blank, shan't we?'

  She paid no heed to this, but repeated: 'What shall I do? What can I do? Sir, I – I haven't very much money!'

  This disclosure was blurted out, and ended in a sob. He replied matter-of-factly: 'What you can do, Cherry, is to stop fretting and fuming, and to leave it to me to find a way out of this bumble-bath. I promise you I will, so pluck up!'

  'I can't pluck up!' she uttered. 'You don't understand! It doesn't curl your liver to find yourself alone in this dreadful city, with only a few shillings in your purse, and not knowing where to go, or – Oh, how can you be so unfeeling as to laugh?'

  'My dear, I can't help but laugh! Where did you pick up that expression?'

  'Oh, I don't know, and what does it signify?' she exclaimed. 'Where are you taking me? Do you know where there is a Registry Office? I must set about finding a situation immediately! But I shall be obliged to put up for the night – oh, dear, perhaps for several nights, because even if I found a situation at once it can't be supposed that I should be wanted instantly! Unless someone was wanted in a bang, because of some accident, or illness, perhaps, and then – '

  'You are forgetting that you would be obliged to provide yourself with a recommendation,' he interpolated dampingly.

  'Well, I am persuaded Miss Fletching would give me one!'

  'No doubt she would, but may I remind you that it will take time to procure one from her?'

  She was daunted, but made a quick recover. 'Very true! But you could recommend me, couldn't you, sir?'

  'No,' he replied unequivocally.

  Her bosom swelled. 'I never thought you would be so disobliging!'

  He smiled. 'I'm not being disobliging. Believe me, nothing could more certainly prejudice your chances of obtaining an eligible situation than a recommendation from me – or any other single man of my age!'

  'Oh!' she said, digesting this. A blast on a coach-horn made her flinch, and she said fervently: 'How can you bear to live in this odious place, where everything is noise, and bustle, and the streets so full of coaches and carriages and carts that – Oh, pray take care, sir! I know we shall collide with something – Oh, look at that carriage, coming out of that street over there!'

  'Shut your eyes!' he advised her, amused by her evident want of faith in his ability to avoid accident.

  'No!' she said resolutely. 'I must learn to accustom myself ! Is it always so crowded in London, sir ?'

  'I am afraid it is often very much more crowded,' he said apologetically. 'In fact, it is at the moment very empty!'

  'And people choose to live here!' she shuddered.

  He had turned back into Piccadilly some few minutes earlier, and now checked his horses for the turn into Arlington Street. 'Yes. I am one of those very odd people, and I am taking you now to my house, so that you can rest and refresh before we continue our journey.'

  She said uneasily: 'I think I ought not to go to your house, sir. I may be a pea-goose but I do know that it is not the thing for females to visit gentlemen's houses, and – and – '

  'No, it is a trifle irregular,' he agreed, 'but before we go any further there are certain arrangements I must make, and you would scarcely wish to wait in the street, would you? So the best thing I can do is to hand you over to my housekeeper for half an hour. I shall tell her that my aunt Emborough placed you in my charge, and that I am taking you to your home, in Hertfordshire.'

  She asked nervously: 'Where – where are you taking me, if you please, sir?'

  'Into Hertfordshire. I am going to ask an old and dear friend of mine to take care of you until I've found your grandfather. Her name is Miss Henrietta Silverdale, and she lives with her mother at a place called Inglehurst. Don't look so scared! I am pretty sure you will like her, and entirely sure that she will be very kind to you.'

  The curricle had come to a standstill outside one of the smaller houses on the east side of the street, and Stebbing had climbed down, and had gone to the horses' heads. Miss Steane whispered: 'It was wrong of me to run away, wasn't it? I know it now, because everything has gone amiss, and – and I have only you to turn to for help in this scrape. But indeed, indeed, sir, I would never have asked you to carry me to London if I had known how it would be!'

  He laid his hand over her tightly clenched ones, and said gently: 'You are tired, my child, and the world looks black, doesn't it? I can only say to you: Trust me! Haven't I told you that I won't abandon you?'

  Her hands twisted under his, and clasped it convulsively. She said: 'I never meant to be such a charge on you! Oh, pray believe me!'

  'Oh, I know you didn't! What you don't know is that I don't regard this adventure as a charge: I regard it as a challenge, and am determined to run your grandfather to earth if I have to go to all the watering-places in the land in search of him!' He saw that his butler had opened the door, and was coming towards the curricle, and disengaged his hand, saying: 'Ah, here's Aldham! Good-day to you, Aldham! Has Tain arrived yet?'

  'Just an hour since, my lord,' replied Aldham, beaming fondly upon him, but casting a doubtful glance at his companion. He had known the Viscount since Desford's cradle-days, having been employed at that time as page-boy at Wolversham, from which lowly position he had graduated by slow degrees to that of First Footman, and thence, in one longed-for leap, to the honourable post of butler to his young lordship; and he knew quite as much about him as did Stebbing, and rather more than did Tain, his lordship's excellent valet, who was the only member of the little household in Arlington Street not born and bred at Wolversham. He could have named (had he not been the soul of discretion) every fair Cyprian with whom his volatile master had enjoyed amatory adventures, from the straw damsel who had caught his first, callow fancy, to the high flyer who had almost ruined him; and he had frequently officiated at far from respectable parties in Arlington Street. But he had never known the Viscount to drive up to the door, in broad daylight, with an unattended Young Female sitting beside him. His first impression, that the Viscount had brought home with him a country lightskirt, was dispelled by a second, covert look at Miss Steane: for one thing, she was no lightskirt; and for another the Viscount never seemed to take to very young females. To Aldham's experienced eye she was more like a girl just broken out of the schoolroom – though what the Viscount was doing with any such was a problem beyond his power to solve.

  But when he had been favoured with a glib explanation of her presence in the curricle he accepted it without even mental re