Chapter III

On the way to church, the Monteiths sifted out their new acquaintance.

"Well, what do you make of him, Frida?" Philip asked, leaning back in his place, with a luxurious air, as soon as the carriage had turned the corner. "Lunatic or sharper?"

Frida gave an impatient gesture with her neatly gloved hand. "For my part," she answered without a second's hesitation, "I make him neither: I find him simply charming."

"That's because he praised your dress," Philip replied, looking wise. "Did ever you know anything so cool in your life? Was it ignorance, now, or insolence?"

"It was perfect simplicity and naturalness," Frida answered with confidence. "He looked at the dress, and admired it, and being transparently naif, he didn't see why he shouldn't say so. It wasn't at all rude, I thought--and it gave me pleasure."

"He certainly has in some ways charming manners," Philip went on more slowly. "He manages to impress one. If he's a madman, which I rather more than half suspect, it's at least a gentlemanly form of madness."

"His manners are more than merely charming," Frida answered, quite enthusiastic, for she had taken a great fancy at first sight to the mysterious stranger. "They've such absolute freedom. That's what strikes me most in them. They're like the best English aristocratic manners, without the insolence; or the freest American manners, without the roughness. He's extremely distinguished. And, oh, isn't he handsome!"

"He is good-looking," Philip assented grudgingly. Philip owned a looking-glass, and was therefore accustomed to a very high standard of manly beauty.

As for Robert Monteith, he smiled the grim smile of the wholly unfascinated. He was a dour business man of Scotch descent, who had made his money in palm-oil in the City of London; and having married Frida as a remarkably fine woman, with a splendid figure, to preside at his table, he had very small sympathy with what he considered her high-flown fads and nonsensical fancies. He had seen but little of the stranger, too, having come in from his weekly stroll, or tour of inspection, round the garden and stables, just as they were on the very point of starting for St. Barnabas: and his opinion of the man was in no way enhanced by Frida's enthusiasm. "As far as I'm concerned," he said, with his slow Scotch drawl, inherited from his father (for though London-born and bred, he was still in all essentials a pure Caledonian)--"As far as I'm concerned, I haven't the slightest doubt but the man's a swindler. I wonder at you, Frida, that you should leave him alone in the house just now, with all that silver. I stepped round before I left, and warned Martha privately not to move from the hall till the fellow was gone, and to call up cook and James if he tried to get