e to ride before his bath and
breakfast. He had one of those constitutions, not uncommon among
barristers--fostered perhaps by ozone in the Courts of Law--that can do
this sort of thing and take no harm. Indeed, he worked best in such long
spurts of vigorous concentration. With real capacity and a liking for
his work, this young man was certainly on his way to make a name; though,
in the intervals of energy, no one gave a more complete impression of
imperturbable drifting on the tides of the moment. Altogether, he was
rather a paradox. He chose to live in that little Chelsea house which
had a scrap of garden rather than in the Temple or St. James's, because
he often preferred solitude; and yet he was an excellent companion, with
many friends, who felt for him the affectionate distrust inspired by
those who are prone to fits and starts of work and play, conviviality and
loneliness. To women, he was almost universally attractive. But if he
had scorched his wings a little once or twice, he had kept heart-free on
the whole. He was, it must be confessed, a bit of a gambler, the sort of
gambler who gets in deep, and then, by a plucky, lucky plunge, gets out
again, until some day perhaps--he stays there. His father, a
diplomatist, had been dead fifteen years; his mother was well known in
the semi-intellectual circles of society. He had no brothers, two
sisters, and an income of his own. Such was Bryan Summerhay at the age
of twenty-six, his wisdom-teeth to cut, his depths unplumbed.

When he started that morning for the Temple, he had still a feeling of
extraordinary lightness in his limbs, and he still saw that face--its
perfect regularity, its warm pallor, and dark smiling eyes rather wide
apart, its fine, small, close-set ears, and the sweep of the black-brown
hair across the low brow. Or was it something much less definite he
saw--an emanation or expression, a trick, a turn, an indwelling grace, a
something that appealed, that turned, and touched him? Whatever it was,
it would not let him be, and he did not desire that it should. For this
was in his character; if he saw a horse that he liked, he put his money
on whatever it ran; if charmed by an opera, he went over and over again;
if by a poem, he almost learned it by heart. And while he walked along
the river--his usual route--he had queer and unaccustomed sensations, now
melting, now pugnacious. And he felt happy.

He was rather late, and went at once int