Helena's Path

CHAPTER PAGE

I AMBROSE, LORD LYNBOROUGH 3

II LARGELY TOPOGRAPHICAL 15

III OF LAW AND NATURAL RIGHTS 33

IV THE MESSAGE OF A PADLOCK 52

V THE BEGINNING OF WAR 70

VI EXERCISE BEFORE BREAKFAST 90

VII ANOTHER WEDGE! 110

VIII THE MARCHESA MOVES 127

IX LYNBOROUGH DROPS A CATCH 148

X IN THE LAST RESORT 171

XI AN ARMISTICE 186

XII AN EMBASSAGE 206

XIII THE FEAST OF ST. JOHN BAPTIST 223

HELENA'S PATH

_Chapter One_

AMBROSE, LORD LYNBOROUGH

Common opinion said that Lord Lynborough ought never to have had a
peerage and forty thousand a year; he ought to have had a pound a week
and a back bedroom in Bloomsbury. Then he would have become an eminent
man; as it was, he turned out only a singularly erratic individual.

So much for common opinion. Let no more be heard of its dull utilitarian
judgements! There are plenty of eminent men--at the moment, it is
believed, no less than seventy Cabinet and ex-Cabinet Ministers (or
thereabouts)--to say nothing of Bishops, Judges, and the British
Academy,--and all this in a nook of the world! (And the world too is a
point!) Lynborough was something much more uncommon; it is not, however,
quite easy to say what. Let the question be postponed; perhaps the story
itself will answer it.

He started life--or was started in it--in a series of surroundings of
unimpeachable orthodoxy--Eton, Christ Church, the Grenadier Guards. He
left each of these schools of mental culture and bodily discipline, not
under a cloud--that metaphor would be ludicrously inept--but in an
explosion. That, having been thus shot out of the first, he managed to
enter the second--that, having been shot out of the second, he walked
placidly into the third--that, having been shot out of the third, he
suffered no apparent damage from his repeated propulsions--these are
matters explicable only by a secret knowledge of British institutions.
His father was strong, his mother came of stock even stronger; he
himself--Ambrose Caverly as he then was--was very popular, and
extraordinarily handsome in his unusual outlandish style.

Helena's Path