slipping another dollar into his hand, and he took it as
if utterly unaware of it, and muttered, 'Osiris keep you, O flower of
women!' And as I got into the motor I gave him another dollar and he
said, 'Osis and Osiris both prolong your existence, O lily of the
ricefield,' and after he had said it he stood beside the door of the
motor and waited without moving till I left. He had such a strange,
rapt look, as if he were still expecting something!"

"How exquisite!" murmured Miss Snagg. It was her business in life to
murmur such things as this for Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. On the whole,
reckoning Grand Opera tickets and dinners, she did very well out of it.

"Is it not?" said Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. "So different from our men. I
felt so ashamed of my chauffeur, our new man, you know; he seemed such
a contrast beside Ram Spudd. The rude way in which the opened the door,
and the rude way in which he climbed on to his own seat, and the
_rudeness_ with which he turned on the power--I felt positively
ashamed. And he so managed it--I am sure he did it on purpose--that the
car splashed a lot of mud over Mr. Spudd as it started."

Yet, oddly enough, the opinion of other people on this new chauffeur,
that of Miss Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown herself, for example, to whose
service he was specially attached, was very different.

The great recommendation of him in the eyes of Miss Dulphemia and her
friends, and the thing that gave him a touch of mystery was--and what
higher qualification can a chauffeur want?--that he didn't look like a
chauffeur at all.

"My dear Dulphie," whispered Miss Philippa Furlong, the rector's sister
(who was at that moment Dulphemia's second self), as they sat behind
the new chauffeur, "don't tell me that he is a chauffeur, because he
_isn't_. He can chauffe, of course, but that's nothing."

For the new chauffeur had a bronzed face, hard as metal, and a stern
eye; and when he put on a chauffeur's overcoat some how it seemed to
turn into a military greatcoat; and even when he put on the round cloth
cap of his profession it was converted straightway into a military
shako. And by Miss Dulphemia and her friends it was presently
reported--or was invented?--that he had served in the Philippines;
which explained at once the scar upon his forehead, which must have
been received at Iloilo, or Huila-Huila, or some other suitable place.

But what affected Miss Dulphemia Brown herself was the splendid
rudeness of the c