. He was loth that his Junta must die. Yes,
his. Could the diners have seen him, they would have known him by his
resemblance to the mezzotint portrait that hung on the wall above him.
They would have risen to their feet in presence of Humphrey Greddon,
founder and first president of the club.

His face was not so oval, nor were his eyes so big, nor his lips so
full, nor his hands so delicate, as they appeared in the mezzotint. Yet
(bating the conventions of eighteenth-century portraiture) the likeness
was a good one. Humphrey Greddon was not less well-knit and graceful
than the painter had made him, and, hard though the lines of the face
were, there was about him a certain air of high romance that could not
be explained away by the fact that he was of a period not our own. You
could understand the great love that Nellie O'Mora had borne him.

Under the mezzotint hung Hoppner's miniature of that lovely and
ill-starred girl, with her soft dark eyes, and her curls all astray from
beneath her little blue turban. And the Duke was telling Mr. Oover her
story--how she had left her home for Humphrey Greddon when she was but
sixteen, and he an undergraduate at Christ Church; and had lived for him
in a cottage at Littlemore, whither he would ride, most days, to be with
her; and how he tired of her, broke his oath that he would marry her,
thereby broke her heart; and how she drowned herself in a mill-pond; and
how Greddon was killed in Venice, two years later, duelling on the Riva
Schiavoni with a Senator whose daughter he had seduced.

And he, Greddon, was not listening very attentively to the tale. He
had heard it told so often in this room, and he did not understand
the sentiments of the modern world. Nellie had been a monstrous pretty
creature. He had adored her, and had done with her. It was right that
she should always be toasted after dinner by the Junta, as in the days
when first he loved her--"Here's to Nellie O'Mora, the fairest witch
that ever was or will be!" He would have resented the omission of that
toast. But he was sick of the pitying, melting looks that were always
cast towards her miniature. Nellie had been beautiful, but, by God! she
was always a dunce and a simpleton. How could he have spent his life
with her? She was a fool, by God! not to marry that fool Trailby, of
Merton, whom he took to see her.

Mr. Oover's moral tone, and his sense of chivalry, were of the American
kind: far higher than ours, even,