James Hubert John Fergus Saltyre—fifteenth Earl of Mount Dunstan, “Jem Salter,” as his neighbours on the Western ranches¹ had called him, the red-haired, second-class passenger of the Meridiana, sat in the great library of his desolate² great house, and stared fixedly³ through the open window at the lovely land spread out before him. From this particular window was to be seen one of the greatest views in England. From the upper nurseries he had lived in as a child he had seen it every day from morning until night, and it had seemed to his young fancy to cover all the plains of the earth. Surely the rest of the world, he had thought, could be but small—though somewhere he knew there was London where the Queen lived, and in London were Buckingham Palace and St. James Palace and Kensington and the Tower, where heads had been chopped off; and the Horse Guards, where splendid, plumed⁴ soldiers rode forth⁵ glittering, with thrilling trumpets⁶ sounding as they moved. These last he always remembered, because he had seen them, and once when he had walked in the park with his nurse there had been an excited stir in the Row, and people had crowded about a certain gate, through which an escorted carriage had been driven, and he had been made at once to take off his hat and stand bareheaded until it passed, because it was the Queen. Somehow from that afternoon he dated the first presentation of certain vaguely⁷ miserable⁸ ideas. Inquiries⁹ made of his attendant, when the cortege had swept by, had elicited¹⁰ the fact that the Royal Lady herself had children—little boys who were princes and little girls who were princesses. What curious and

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