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 And as this reflection crossed his mind, the door opened, and there appeared the same tall beautiful stately lady he had seen with Els on the Bowling Green at Bridwell on that Gaudy Day long ago. Advancing with a smile, she held out her hand and made some remark about being very glad at last to meet one she had heard so much of. He was just murmuring some confused response, the while, with a vague feeling of uneasiness, he wondered what it was she had been told, when Lord Augustus, her brother, came in, and almost at the same moment there was the distant clang of a bell, the door opened once more, and the butler having announced dinner, his lordship, who was indeed the only other person stopping in the house, without waiting for Els, gave his arm to his sister and went out.

'So sorry,' he said, looking back over his shoulder at him, who, doing his best not to tread on his hostess' train, was following: 'So sorry we haven't got a lady for you! I'm afraid you'll have to take yourself in!' And he gave a hearty laugh.

'Was Lance always late at school?' Lady Adelaide asked. 'He always is here!'

During dinner he scarcely spoke, in part from shyness and in part because his attention was much taken up by Lord Augustus. For the first time in his life he now saw one who not only lived in that Great World of Secretaries of State and Peers of the Realm, Blue Ribbons and Princes of the Blood, of which he had dreamt so often, wherein he too one day, he thought, was destined to play a part, but was, as he knew, himself an Excellency and a Right Honourable, an Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, a Privy Councillor and Grand Cross of the Bath. And as these pompous titles sounded in his ears with equal pleasure and no more meaning than, when reading the Decline and Fall, he had found in the repetition of those of the Sebastocrator and the Cæsar, the Panhypersebastes and the Protosebastes, the Protovestiare and Great Logothete, from the opposite side of the table he considered him as one newly returned from some