On the whole, it was rather a relief than otherwise to Dermot to discover that the game was up. He had had about enough of it. Still, he objected to the manner of his defeat. Twenty thousand pounds ought not to have caused the fall of one who had in his time handled millions—even if most of those millions were only on paper. Twenty thousand pounds was not enough. The amount was not Napoleonic. It ought to have been two hundred thousand pounds at the very least. The ignominious character of the defeat that stared him in the face was the one factor that inclined Dermot to go on with the fight, if by any possibility it could be managed.
"Are you absolutely sure, Dermot, that nothing can be done?" persisted Mrs. Windleband, doggedly. "Have you tried everyone?"
"Everyone—the Possibles, the Probables, the Might-be-Touched, and even the Highly-Unlikelies. Never an echo came to the minstrel's wooing song. No, my dear; we've got to take to the boats this time, and that's right soon. Unless, of course, someone possessed at one and the same time of twenty thousand pounds and a very confiding nature, happens to tumble out of the sky."
As the words left his lips an aeroplane came sailing over the tops of the trees that lay below them. Gracefully as any bird it came down on the lawn—not twenty yards from where the Windlebands were seated.
"Who is the intrepid aviator?" queried Dermot, lazily, as a nimble little figure, clad in overalls, hopped from the machine and helped out his companion, whose clumsy progress to earth was rather that of the landsman getting out of an open boat in which he has spent a long and perilous night at sea. "Looks like one of those French chaps."
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"Doesn't matter a bit who the intrepid aviator is," rejoined Mrs. Windleband, in a voice that shook with unwonted excitement. "It's the other man that I'm interested in. Don't you see who it is? That's Roland Bleke."
"Roland Bleke?" The Napoleon of Finance shook his head. The name seemed to convey nothing to him.
"Yes, yes—Roland Bleke!" repeated Mrs. Windleband, impatiently. "My dear, you must have heard of him. The man who won the Calcutta Sweep and was kidnapped or something, at Lexingham yesterday by that French aviator—what's his name?—Etienne Feriaud. The papers are full of it this morning."
"Ah, I haven't read the papers this morning. Hence my ignorance on the score of Mr. Roland Bleke. The world knows nothing of its greatest men. How on earth did you recognize the chap?"
"From his picture, of course."
She pointed to a photograph which adorned the front page of one of the illustrated dailies that lay on the table before them. Dermot glanced at it, and then said, admiringly, to his wife:—
"What a wonderful woman you are!
