



Produced by Cathy Maxam, Juliet Sutherland and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net









    Helena's Path

    _By_

    ANTHONY HOPE

    AUTHOR OF DOUBLE HARNESS
    TRISTRAM OF BLENT
    ETC.

    [Illustration]

    GARDEN CITY      NEW YORK
    DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

    1912


    _Copyright, 1907, by Anthony Hope Hawkins_




    CONTENTS


    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.

His father being still alive--and, though devoted to him, by now
apprehensive of his doings--his means were for the next few years
limited. Yet he contrived to employ himself. He took a soup-kitchen and
ran it; he took a yacht and sank it; he took a public-house,