enough, Lady McIntyre. We will persevere with your friend Lord Rosebery's remedy.' Each clicked his heels and pressed his lips to her hand and left her in a flutter. The poor young men's anxiety about their father was most touching, especially Carl's. Lady McIntyre dotes on Carl. He was n't so taken up by his filial preoccupations, either, but that he could sympathize with the anxiety of a mother-Lady McIntyre's about Madge. Mr. Carl agreed that Miss Gayne was not the person. He had seen that at once. No influence whatever. Miss McIntyre was a very charming young lady, full of character, fire, too. She required special handling.

"Ah; how well you understand! Now, what do you advise me to do? Seeing you reminds me,' Lady McIntyre said with her infantile candor, 'that Madge has never been able to learn German. Maybe she inherits that. I never could.'

"Ah! you had n't the right introduction to our tongue. You, I am very sure -yes, and Miss McIntyre too-'

"I've often wondered if we could n't try a German governess. We 've had so many French ones, and quite an army of English and Scotch-'

"Ah, a German governess!' He pulled at his mustache. Certainly you would be giving your daughter her best chance to acquire the language.' Before he left Kirklamont Mr. Pforzheim had promised to consult his aunt, the widow of a Heidelberg professor. Frau Lenz had a wide acquaintance in academic circles. He would consult Frau Lenz without delay. "He did. Such a dependable young man!

"Frau Lenz replied that by a special Providence a young lady of the very highest qualifications for the post described was in London at that moment, on her way home from America. They might n't be able to get her. Frau Lenz could hardly hold out much hope of that, but the young lady would be the very person to consult.

"She was the very person to get, Lady McIntyre said when she came back from

interviewing the paragon. 'And, Heaven be praised, I 've got her!'

"They had gone back to London on account of that commission Sir William had insisted on having appointed. There were a lot of people in London that July, and things going on, Madge in the thick of everything as though she'd been twenty-five instead of fifteen. That 's how the Schwarzenberg found her, neglecting lessons, ignoring laws, living at the theater, figuring at her father's official parties, sitting up till all hours of the night, smoking cigarettes till her fingers looked as if she 'd been shelling green walnuts, gossiping, arguing, ready with her decided opinions on every subject under the sun."

That's the situation to which Miss von Schwarzenberg was introduced as the latest in a long and sorry line. Oh, Napier himself must have seen a round dozen of them. Miss Madge's governesses were a byword for bewilderment, for outraged propriety, followed by dumb misery and inevitable defeat. Madge bowled them over like tenpins. Even Sir William, who for a lifetime had governed a vast section of the British mercantile marine and was now helping to guide the ship of state confessed himself powerless before the problem of governing his daughter.

Napier had watched the transformation.

"They 've raised the Schwarzenberg's salary twice." She had subdued every member of the minister's household.

"Not you, I hope?" Julian said quickly. Napier laughed.

"She would set your mind at rest on that score. Only the other day she got me into a corner. 'What is it that you have against me, Mr. Napier?' she said. I told her I had nothing against her, which is quite true. "You don't like me," she said. It took me so by surprise, I stammered:

"I? What an idea!'

W

CHAPTER II HEN the young men reached Kirklamont the McIntyres, with one exception, were already gathered about the tea-table in the hall of the big, ugly Scotch country house. "The family" consisted at that moment only of three, the fourth person present being Miss von Schwarzenberg, for it was still only midJuly. In another month the party would number a score or more. That would be when the absent sons (two soldiers and a sailor) had come up for the shooting and brought their friends.

That summer of 1914 overworked cabinet ministers were glad to seize any opportunity of turning their backs on the town. Sir William's wife had preceded him by a few days, "to get Kirklamont into running order," she said.

"Nothing of the sort," her daughter confided to Gavan Napier. "It's really because Miss von Schwarzenberg is dying to know what makes me adore Scotland. And I'm dying to make her admit her old Tyrol is n't a patch on Invernessshire."

With only one exception (again Miss von Schwarzenberg) every one of the party was stoutly booted, and dressed in tweeds, the men in breeches and golfstockings, Lady McIntyre and her daughter in short skirts and gaiters.

Cup in hand, Sir William, as became the head of the house, stood planted on wide-apart legs in front of the fireplace, a sanguine-colored, plump little partridge of a man, with a kind, rather rusé face.

Lady McIntyre, behind the urn, fair, fluffy-haired, blue-eyed, looked, as such women will, far older in the country than she did in her "London clothes." But she was much too correct not to make any sacrifice called for by the unwritten law of her kind. Behold her, therefore, bereft of disguising draperies, tulle boas, drooping feathers and veils, submitting to the severity of a coat-and-skirt costume which betrayed the deflection from the upright in her narrow back. Out of the white silk blouse, open at the neck, as fashion

dictated, rose her meager and stringy little neck, like that of a newly hatched starling. For some reason the addition of dangling diamond earrings emphasized painfully an excuse for frivolity which in her case had been outlived. To tell the blunt truth, Lady McIntyre looked like some shrunken little duenna attendant on the opulent majesty of the heavy-braided, ox-eyed Juno at her side; for Miss von Schwarzenberg shared the high seat, otherwise Lady McIntyre's carved settle. At her left sat Madge, her pupil, and an Aberdeen terrier.

"You really"—the high-pitched excitement in the girl's voice reached the young men depositing their golf-clubs and caps in the lobby-"you really and truly want. to learn golf, after all?"

"If nobody has any objection," a voice answered in an accent very slightly foreign, and to the English ear suggesting, as much as anything, Western American.

"Objection! Quite the contrary. Capital idea." Sir William spoke heartily. Bobby, fourteen, but looking nearer eighteen, and who reverted to some taller, raw-boned type, spilled over and sprawled out of an easy-chair as he beat the arm and cried out with animation and a mouth full of girdle-cake:

"Bags I teach you, Fräulein! You know there are jolly links at Cromarty, too." "What's that got to do with it?" demanded Sir William.

"Well, are n't we going there for the Ross's shoot?"

A little pause ensued in which Sir William caught his wife's eye the fraction of a second, and sheered off as the young men entered. Julian Grant made his way to his hostess.

"I hope you 've been taking it out of Gavan," Sir William called out by way. of greeting.

Julian played up to this reception by proceeding to describe with mock braggadocio how he 'd completely taken the shine out of the champion. That person, handing tea, contented himself with privately observing yet again how his friend Julian, long and lithe and dark, offered

to the rotund little figure of the eminent official a contrast that ministered pleasantly to a sense of the ludicrous. Sir William's bald bullet-head barely reached the height of Julian's chest. But it was notorious-and Napier had not worked for two years with Sir William without finding good reason to share the prevalent opinion-that inside the aforesaid bullet was an uncommon amount of shrewd sense and a highly developed skill in organization.

Sir William ran his department, as he ran his vast commercial enterprises, with an ease that was own child of intelligence of a high degree. But now, as though it were the main factor in life, he talked golf.

This turned out to be also the ladies' topic, as Napier, past master in the art of following two conversations at once, presently discovered.

"I sha'n't go near Cromarty if Miss

von

Schwarzenberg does n't come." Madge delivered the ultimatum in her firmest voice.

"Of course she 'll come," said Bobby, trying with little of Gavan's success to divide his attention impartially between the group at the tea-table and the group at the fire. "No, Father; you did it in five." Bobby forgot the tea-table and fell into an argument that bordered on passion.

The governess, after a perfunctory "How do you do?" to the visitor, had leaned over to stroke the Aberdeen. The lady's full-moon face, with its heavy, shapely nose, its smooth apple cheeks, its quite beautiful mouth, was bent down till her chin rested on her generous bust. It occurred to Napier that she often adopted this pose. It gave her an air of pensiveness, of submission, the more striking in. a person of so much character.

Also the little tendrils of yellow hair that escaped from under the Gretchen-like banded braids cast delicate shadows on the whitest neck Napier had ever seen. Oh, she had her points.

"It has nothing to do with it, that other gov- that we 've never taken any

but just the family before." Madge's interchange with her mother refused to be kept down to the demi-voix. "What 's the good of relations? They won't mind. a bit. They'll be grateful when they know her."

"Perhaps," said Lady McIntyre, feebly, "Miss Greta won't care to come."

"Oh, won't she!" Madge interjected. "I don't enjoy it much." Lady McIntyre clutched feebly at the memory of past boredom. "At Cromarty, when it is n't ships, it 's nothing but golf, golf," -she nodded toward the group at the fire,—“like that, the whole day long."

"Yes; but you don't play any more," Madge threw in, "and Miss Greta has just said-did you hear, Mr. Grant?" she called out. "Miss von Schwarzenberg says now she wants to learn our foolish national game."

"Never!" Julian turned back to the tea-table. His tone was faintly ironic, as though the sensation created by this lady's conversion to golf seemed disproportionate to its importance.

But there could be only one reason for such a view. Although the McIntyres had, as they said, "rather adopted" Napier's friend, his relation to the family was as yet too new for him quite, to grasp the peculiar value the family attached to the governess's contentment with her lot.

That much was implied in Lady McIntyre's appeal:

"I wonder if you 'd be very kind, Mr. Grant, and help the children to teach Miss von Schwarzenberg?"

The almost infinitesimal pause was canceled, obliterated by Miss von Schwarzenberg's promptitude.

"Oh, I could n't think of being such a trouble." She had risen. "Sit here, Mr. Grant," she said. "Yes, please! I've finished." Despite his protest, she retired. to a chair on the far side of the fireplace -Napier's side-and picked up her knitting.

Madge followed dog-like, and so did the Aberdeen.

"It is a comfort," Lady McIntyre went on, "to find such a terribly clever