Page:The Duke Decides (1904).djvu/336

 “Then, sir, by token of that frankness, your Grace is a straight man,” the Senator said, decidedly, and with an air that invested his words with greater weight than was perhaps due to their moral perspective. “And,” he added in a lighter vein, “somehow, the honor of your house seems to have got inextricably mixed with that of mine.”

“That’s exactly the way I hoped you’d look at it,” responded the Duke, earnestly. ‘‘I think you take my meaning. May I speak to Leonie?”

“It’s what I should do in your place,” was the Senator’s reply—a reply which had the effect of relaxing General Sadgrove’s ramrod-like attitude, and of causing that grim man-hunter to subside into his corner, with a not unkindly chuckle.

On a winter afternoon, six months afterwards, Alec Forsyth entered the firelit dining-room of the Prior’s Tarrant dower-house, which, as agent of the ducal estates, he had occupied since his marriage in September. The Duke and Duchess were away in Egypt on their honeymoon, and Forsyth had been