more than mere animal spirits lurked in the depths of his
dark brown eyes. An observer would also have noticed that his mouth and
chin had something of the stern and sad look of fatalism that one sees
in the pictures of Rossetti and Burne-Jones. He had the unmistakable
public-school and University hall-mark, and if he had been fairly liked
at Eton, at Oxford, where (as Mr. Max Beerbohm so rightly says) the
nonsense knocked out of one at school is carefully and painlessly put
back, Woodville was really popular, and considered remarkably clever,
capable of enjoying, and even of conceiving, Ideas. Detesting the
ready-made cheap romantic, and yet in vague search of the unusual, he
often complained bitterly that his history--so far--was like the little
piece of explanation of the plot (for those who have missed it) at the
beginning of a chapter of a feuilleton in the _Daily Mail_. It was
rather hard to have to admit that he had been left an orphan at three
years old and adopted by his bachelor uncle, a baronet called Sir Bryce
Woodville, who had brought him up as his acknowledged heir, with the
prospect of a big estate.

Frank had gone with careless gaiety through school and college, when his
apparently sane and kind relative, growing tired of romantic drama,
suddenly behaved like a guardian in an old-fashioned farce. Instead of
making his wife his housekeeper, as most men do, he made his housekeeper
his wife. She was a depressing woman. In a year he had a son and heir,
and within two months after this event, he died, leaving his nephew
exactly one hundred pounds a year.

This curiously unpractical joke taught the young man that absurdly
improbable things are quite as liable to happen in real life as in weak
literature.

The legacy was, of course, abject poverty to a man who, having always
had an exceptionally large allowance, had naturally never thought about
money, and though Frank believed himself not to be extravagant because
he had never made large debts, his ideas of the ordinary necessities of
life were not conspicuously moderate, including, as they did, horses,
hospitality, travel, Art, and at least the common decency of a jolly
little motor of his own. He had often been warned by his uncle to spend
the twenty thousand a year to which he was heir freely but not lavishly.

Why Sir Bryce Woodville had shown so sudden and marked an interest in a
child he had known but for two months (and who had screamed most of
tha