senger was afoot, but Summerhay sat like a man in a trance, the smile
coming and going on his lips; and behind him the air that ever stirs
above the river faintly moved with the tide flowing up.

It was nearly three, just coming dawn, when he went in, and, instead of
going to bed, sat down to a case in which he was junior on the morrow,
and worked right on till it was time 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 chara