ple of male and female
is necessary for the completeness even of a club.

The Hyacinth Club-house looks upon Piccadilly and the Green Park. The
favourite place of concourse of its members is the magnificent
smoking-room on the first floor, the bow-windows of which command a view
up and down the fashionable thoroughfare, and over the trees and the
undulating sward of the Park to the gates of Buckingham Palace. On a
Monday afternoon in the beginning of May, the bow-windows were open, and
several men sat in leather lounges (while one leaned against a
window-sash), luxuriously smoking, and noting the warm, palpitating life
of the world without. A storm which had been silently and doubtfully
glooming and gathering the night before had burst and poured in the
morning, and it was such a spring afternoon as thrills the heart with
new life and suffuses the soul with expectation--such an afternoon as
makes all women appear beautiful and all men handsome. The south-west
wind blew soft and balmy, and all nature rejoiced as the bride in the
presence of the bridegroom. The trees in the Park were full of sap, and
their lusty buds were eagerly opening to the air and the light. The
robin sang with a note almost as rich and sensuous as that of the
thrush; and the shrill and restless sparrows chirped and chattered about
the houses and among the horses' feet, and were as full of the joy of
life as the men and women who thronged the pavements or reclined in
their carriages in the sumptuous ease of wealth and beauty.

Of the men who languidly gazed upon the gay and splendid scene from the
windows of the Club, none seemed so interested as the man who leaned
against the window-frame. He appeared more than interested--absorbed,
indeed--in the world without, and he looked bright and handsome enough,
and charged enough with buoyant health, to be the ideal bridegroom of
Nature in her springtide.

He was a dark man, tall and well built, with clear brown eyes. His black
hair (which was not cropped short, as is the fashion) had a lustrous
softness, and at the same time an elastic bushiness, which nothing but
the finest-tempered health can give; and his complexion, though tanned
by exposure, had yet much of the smoothness of youth, save where the
razor had passed upon his beard. Thus seen, a little way off, he
appeared a young man in his rosy twenties; on closer view and
acquaintance, however, that superficial impression was contradicted by
the set