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 cast of countenance who was standing near the rose garden, talking to the gardener and watching the young couple strolling on the terrace below, was the mother of the pretty girl; and that she was smiling because the latter had recently become engaged to the tall, pleasant-faced youth at her side.

Sherlock Holmes himself might have been misled. One can hear him explaining the thing to Watson in one of those lightning flashes of inductive reasoning of his: “It is the only explanation, my dear Watson. If the lady were merely complimenting the gardener on his rose garden, and if her smile were merely caused by the excellent appearance of that rose garden, there would be an answering smile on the face of the gardener. But, as you see, he looks morose and gloomy.”

As a matter of fact the gardener—that is to say, the stocky, brown-faced man in shirt sleeves and corduroy trousers who was frowning into a can of whale-oil solution—was the Earl of Marshmoreton; and there were two reasons for his gloom. He hated to be interrupted while working and, furthermore, Lady Caroline Byng always got on his nerves, and never more so than when, as now, she speculated on the possibility of a romance between her stepson Reggie and his lordship’s daughter Maud.

Only his intimates would have recognized in this curious corduroy-trousered figure the seventh Earl of Marshmoreton. The Lord Marshmoreton who made intermittent appearances in London, who lunched among bishops at the Athenzeum Club without exciting remark, was a correctly dressed gentleman whom no one would have suspected of covering his sturdy legs in anything but the finest cloth. But if you will