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Rh recognize him, and neither did the Marquise, if she were one of the young women who had run out to the car. Maybe, if he could escape recognition now, he might escape altogether. Once swept away among the flotsam and jetsam below stairs, he would be both out of sight and out of mind. I did not care about myself now, only for him, and I was beginning to cheer up a little, when I noticed that the other young man was gazing at the chauffeur very intently.

His flushed face, and small fair moustache, his light eyes and hair, looked as English as the Marquis' short, pointed chestnut beard and sleek hair en brosse, looked French. "Bertie!" I said to myself, flashing a glance at him from under my veil.

Bertie, if Bertie it was, did not speak. He simply stared, mechanically pulling an end of his tiny moustache, while Sir Samuel talked. But he was so much interested in his stepfather's chauffeur that when the really very pretty girl near him spoke, over his shoulder, he did not hear.

"Well, we began to think you 'd tumbled over a precipice!" exclaimed Sir Samuel, with the jovial loudness that comes to men of his age from good champagne or the rich red wines of Southern France.

Jack explained. The fair-haired young man let him finish in peace, and then said, slowly, "Is n't your name Dane?"

"It is," replied my brother.

"Thought I knew your face," went on the other. "So you 've taken to chauffeuring as a last resort—what?"

He was intended by Providence to be good looking, but so snobbish was his expression as he spoke, so cruelly