They were in a smaller room than any they had previously traversed, an octagonal room, which a single lofty window filled with sunshine.

“Oh, thank you,” said Lady Blanchemain, and seated herself on the circular divan in the centre of the polished terrazza floor.  She wasn’t really tired in the least, the indefatigable old sight-seer; but a respite from picture-gazing would enable her to turn the talk.  She put up her mother-of-pearl lorgnon, and glanced round the walls; then, lowering it, she frankly raised her eyes, full of curiosity and kindness, to her companion’s.

“It’s a surprise, and a delightful one,” she remarked, “having pushed so far afield in a foreign land, to be met by the good offices of a fellow-countryman—­it’s so nice of you to be English.”

And her eyes softly changed, their curiosity being veiled by a kind of humorous content.

The young man’s face, from its altitude of six-feet-something, beamed responsively down upon her.

“Oh,” he laughed, “you mustn’t give me too much credit.  To be English nowadays is so ingloriously easy—­since foreign lands have become merely the wider suburbs of London.”

Lady Blanchemain’s eyes lighted approvingly.  Afterwards she looked half serious.

“True,” she discriminated, “London has spread pretty well over the whole of Europe; but England, thanks be to goodness, still remains mercifully small.”

“Yes,” agreed the young man, though with a lilt of dubiety, and a frown of excogitation, as if he weren’t sure that he had quite caught her drift.

“The mercy of it is,” she smilingly pointed out, “that English folk, decent ones, have no need to fight shy of each other when they meet as strangers.  We all know more or less about each other by hearsay, or about each other’s people; and we’re all pretty sure to have some common acquaintances.  The smallness of England makes for sociability and confidence.”

“It ought to, one would think,” the young man admitted.  “But does it, in fact?  It had somehow got stuck in my head that English folk, meeting as strangers, were rather apt to glare.  We’re most of us in such a funk, you see, lest, if we treat a stranger with civility, he should turn out not to be a duke.”

“Oh,” cried Lady Blanchemain, with merriment, “you forget that I said decent.  I meant, of course, folk who are dukes.  We’re all dukes—­or bagmen.”

The young man chuckled; but in a minute he pulled a long face, and made big, ominous eyes.

“I feel I ought to warn you,” he said in a portentous voice, “that some of us are mere marquises—­of the house of Carabas.”

Lady Blanchemain, her whole expansive person, simmered with enjoyment.

“Bless you,” she cried, “those are the ducalest, for marquises—­of the house of Carabas—­are men of dash and spirit, born to bear everything before them, and to marry the King’s daughter.”