esplendent in the gold and blue
and scarlet of a crack Dragoon Regiment. Owen stood upon the hearthrug,
for once in Mildred's company, and not thinking of Mildred. And with tears
rising in her round, pretty, foolish eyes the girl looked from the face
and figure enclosed within the silver frame, to the face and bust that had
for background the high mantel-mirror in its carved frame of Spanish oak.

There was the square black head bending forwards--"poking," she termed
it--upon the massive, bowed shoulders; the white face, square too, with
its short, blunt, hooked nose and grim, determined mouth and jaws, showing
the bluish grain of the strong beard and moustache that Owen kept closely
shaven. The heavy forehead, the smutty brows overshadowing eyes of clear,
vivid, startling Alpine blue, the close small ears, the thick white
throat, were very, very unattractive in Mildred's eyes--at least, in
comparison with the three-volume-novel charms of the grey-eyed,
golden-moustached, classically-featured, swaggering young military dandy
in the coloured photograph. David had been with his regiment in India when
Owen had first seemed to be a good deal attracted to Pont Street. He had
wooed Mildred with dogged persistency, and won her without perceptible
triumph, and Mildred had been immensely flattered at first by the conquest
of this man, whom everybody said was going to be famous, great,
distinguished ... and now ... the wedding-day was coming awfully near. And
how on earth was it possible for a girl to tell a man with Owen's
dreadfully grim, sarcastic mouth, and those terrible blue eyes that
sometimes looked through and through you--that she preferred his brother?

Poor, dear, beautiful, devoted David! so honourable, so shocked at the
discovery that his passion was reciprocated, so very romantically in love.
Only the day previously, calling in at Pont Street at an hour unusual for
him, Owen had found them together, Mildred and David, who, having been
unexpectedly relieved of duty by an accommodating brother-officer, had, as
he rather laboriously explained, run up from Spurhambury for the day. It
was an awfully near thing, the guilty ones agreed afterwards, but Owen had
suspected nothing. These swell scientific men were often a little bit slow
in the uptake....

But to-day--to-day their dupe saw clearly. He recalled the Pont Street
incident, and the flushed faces of the couple. He saw once more the
silver-framed photograph in the