by the general passion for puffing down and
building up, which had spoiled half London in his opinion.

A man, more silent than anything on earth, with the soft, quick, dark
eyes of a woodcock and a long, greenish, knitted waistcoat, black
cutaway, and tight trousers strapped over his boots, opened the door.

"I shan't go out again, Markey. Mrs. Markey must give me some dinner.
Anything'll do."

Markey signalled that he had heard, and those brown eyes under eyebrows
meeting and forming one long, dark line, took his master in from head to
heel. He had already nodded last night, when his wife had said the
gov'nor would take it hard. Retiring to the back premises, he jerked his
head toward the street and made a motion upward with his hand, by which
Mrs. Markey, an astute woman, understood that she had to go out and shop
because the gov'nor was dining in. When she had gone, Markey sat down
opposite Betty, Gyp's old nurse. The stout woman was still crying in a
quiet way. It gave him the fair hump, for he felt inclined to howl like a
dog himself. After watching her broad, rosy, tearful face in silence for
some minutes, he shook his head, and, with a gulp and a tremor of her
comfortable body, Betty desisted. One paid attention to Markey.

Winton went first into his daughter's bedroom, and gazed at its emptied
silken order, its deserted silver mirror, twisting viciously at his
little moustache. Then, in his sanctum, he sat down before the fire,
without turning up the light. Anyone looking in, would have thought he
was asleep; but the drowsy influence of that deep chair and cosy fire had
drawn him back into the long-ago. What unhappy chance had made him pass
HER house to-day!

Some say there is no such thing as an affinity, no case--of a man, at
least--made bankrupt of passion by a single love. In theory, it may be
so; in fact, there are such men--neck-or-nothing men, quiet and
self-contained, the last to expect that nature will play them such a
trick, the last to desire such surrender of themselves, the last to know
when their fate is on them. Who could have seemed to himself, and,
indeed, to others, less likely than Charles Clare Winton to fall over
head and ears in love when he stepped into the Belvoir Hunt ballroom at
Grantham that December evening, twenty-four years ago? A keen soldier, a
dandy, a first-rate man to hounds, already almost a proverb in his
regiment for coolness and for a sort of courteous disr