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On a windy afternoon in November, when more than two months had closed over the incidents previously recorded, a number of farmers were sitting in a room of the Lord-Quantock-Arms Inn, Markton, that was used for the weekly ordinary.
What would he have given to impersonate her lover in the piece! But neither Paula nor any one else had asked him. The eventful evening came. Somerset had been engaged during the day with the different people by whom the works were to be carried out and in the evening went to his rooms at the Lord-Quantock-Arms, Markton, where he dined.
It happened one morning that he glanced through a local paper while waiting at the Lord-Quantock-Arms for the pony-carriage to be brought round in which he often drove to the castle. The paper was two days old, but to his unutterable amazement he read therein a paragraph which ran as follows:
The flame increased, and blown upon by the wind roared round the pictures, the tapestries, and the cradle, up to the plaster ceiling and through it into the forest of oak timbers above. The best sitting-room at the Lord-Quantock-Arms in Markton was as cosy this evening as a room can be that lacks the minuter furniture on which cosiness so largely depends.
'Excellent! said Somerset, with a spectral smile. When he awoke the next morning at the Lord-Quantock-Arms Hotel Somerset felt quite morbid on recalling the intelligence he had received from Mrs. Camperton.
On his table was a letter in a strange writing, and indifferently turning it over he found from the superscription that it had been addressed to him days before at the Lord-Quantock-Arms Hotel, Markton, where it had lain ever since, the landlord probably expecting him to return. Opening the missive, he found to his surprise that it was, after all, an invitation to the Hunt Ball.
De Stancy had by this time disappeared, and Somerset walked on to his rooms at the Lord-Quantock-Arms, where he remained till he had dined, picturing the discomfiture of his alert rival when there should enter to him as Princess, not Paula Power, but Miss Bell of the Regent's Theatre, London. Thus the hour passed, till he found that if he meant to see the issue of the plot it was time to be off.
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