s destined, as you shall see, to irritate me very much
more in recollection.

Yet I was glad he had asked me to luncheon--glad because I liked him
and glad because I dislike mysteries. Though you may think me very
dense for not having thoroughly understood Pethel in the course of my
first meeting with him, the fact is that I was only aware, and that
dimly, of something more in him than he had cared to reveal--some veil
behind which perhaps lurked his right to the title so airily bestowed
on him by Grierson. I assured myself, as I walked home, that if veil
there was, I should to-morrow find an eyelet. But one's intuition when
it is off duty seems always a much more powerful engine than it does on
active service; and next day, at sight of Pethel awaiting me outside
his hotel, I became less confident. His, thought I, was a face which,
for all its animation, would tell nothing--nothing, at any rate, that
mattered. It expressed well enough that he was pleased to see me; but
for the rest I was reminded that it had a sort of frank inscrutability.
Besides, it was at all points so very usual a face--a face that
couldn't (so I then thought), even if it had leave to, betray
connection with a "great character." It was a strong face, certainly;
but so are yours and mine.

And very fresh it looked, though, as he confessed, Pethel had sat up in
"that beastly baccarat-room" till five A.M. I asked, had he lost?
Yes, he had lost steadily for four hours (proudly he laid stress on
this), but in the end--well, he had won it all back "and a bit more."
"By the way," he murmured as we were about to enter the hall, "don't
ever happen to mention to my wife what I told you about that Argentine
deal. She's always rather nervous about--investments. I don't tell
her about them. She's rather a nervous woman altogether, I'm sorry to
say."

This did not square with my preconception of her. Slave that I am to
traditional imagery, I had figured her as "flaunting," as
golden-haired, as haughty to most men, but with a provocative smile
across the shoulder for some. Nor, indeed, did her husband's words
save me the suspicion that my eyes deceived me when anon I was
presented to a very pale, small lady whose hair was rather white than
gray. And the "little daughter!" This prodigy's hair was as yet
"down," but looked as if it might be up at any moment: she was nearly
as tall as her father, whom she very much resembled in face and figure
and h