The things she was listening to stood out from a background of unreality so startling.

She was even faintly tormented by shadowy memories of a play she had seen years ago at Drury Lane.

And Drury Lane incidents were of a world so incongruously remote from the house in Eaton Square and her grace's clever aquiline ivory face--and his lordship with his quiet bearing and his unromantic and elderly, tired fineness.

And yet he was going to undertake to do a thing which was of the order of deed the sober everyday mind could only expect from the race of persons known as "heroes" in theatres and in books.

And he was noticeably and wholly untheatrical about it.