is slim, upright figure, moving with
just that unexaggerated swing and balance becoming to a lancer of the old
school, even if he has been on the retired list for sixteen years.

Poor Betty! He thought of her with irritated sympathy--she need not have
given way to tears on the door-step. She might well feel lost now Gyp
was gone, but not so lost as himself! His pale-gloved hand--the one real
hand he had, for his right hand had been amputated at the wrist--twisted
vexedly at the small, grizzling moustache lifting itself from the corners
of his firm lips. On this grey February day he wore no overcoat;
faithful to the absolute, almost shamefaced quietness of that wedding, he
had not even donned black coat and silk hat, but wore a blue suit and a
hard black felt. The instinct of a soldier and hunting man to exhibit no
sign whatever of emotion did not desert him this dark day of his life;
but his grey-hazel eyes kept contracting, staring fiercely, contracting
again; and, at moments, as if overpowered by some deep feeling, they
darkened and seemed to draw back in his head. His face was narrow and
weathered and thin-cheeked, with a clean-cut jaw, small ears, hair darker
than the moustache, but touched at the side wings with grey--the face of
a man of action, self-reliant, resourceful. And his bearing was that of
one who has always been a bit of a dandy, and paid attention to "form,"
yet been conscious sometimes that there were things beyond. A man, who,
preserving all the precision of a type, yet had in him a streak of
something that was not typical. Such often have tragedy in their pasts.

Making his way towards the park, he turned into Mount Street. There was
the house still, though the street had been very different then--the
house he had passed, up and down, up and down in the fog, like a ghost,
that November afternoon, like a cast-out dog, in such awful, unutterable
agony of mind, twenty-three years ago, when Gyp was born. And then to be
told at the door--he, with no right to enter, he, loving as he believed
man never loved woman--to be told at the door that SHE was dead--dead in
bearing what he and she alone knew was their child! Up and down in the
fog, hour after hour, knowing her time was upon her; and at last to be
told that! Of all fates that befall man, surely the most awful is to
love too much.

Queer that his route should take him past the very house to-day, after
this new bereavement! Accursed luck-