with the automatic nervous
snicker that deepened the furrows from nostril to mouth, a tall
stoop-shouldered man of scant forty with the high colour, long, nervous
nose, and dull eye of Dutch descent; and Colonel Augustus Magnelius
Pietrus Vetchen, scion of an illustrious line whose ancestors had been
colonial governors and judges before the British flag floated from the
New Amsterdam fort. His daughter was the celebrated beauty, Mrs. Tom
O'Hara. She had married O'Hara and so many incredible millions that
people insisted that was why Colonel Vetchen's eyebrows expressed the
acute slant of perpetual astonishment.

So they were all cordial, for was he not related to the late General
Garret Suydam and, therefore, distantly to them all? And these men who
took themselves and their lineage so seriously, took Hamil seriously;
and he often attempted to appreciate it seriously, but his sense of
humour was too strong. They were all good people, kindly and harmless
snobs; and when he had made his adieux under the shadow of the white
portico, he lingered a moment to observe the obsolete gallantry with
which Mr. Classon and Colonel Vetchen wafted Virginia up the steps.

Cuyp lingered to venture a heavy pleasantry or two which distorted his
long nose into a series of white-ridged wrinkles, then he ambled away
and disappeared within the abode of that divinity who shapes our ends,
the manicure; and Hamil turned once more toward the gardens.

The hour was still early; of course too unconventional to leave cards on
the Cardross family, even too early for a business visit; but he thought
he would stroll past the villa, the white walls of which he had dimly
seen the evening before. Besides his Calypso was there. Alas! for
Calypso. Yet his heart tuned up a trifle as he thought of seeing her so
soon again.

And so, a somewhat pensive but wholly attractive and self-confident
young opportunist in white flannels, he sauntered through the hotel
gardens and out along the dazzling shell-road.

No need for him to make inquiries of passing negroes; no need to ask
where the House of Cardross might be found; for although he had seen it
only by starlight, and the white sunshine now transformed everything
under its unfamiliar glare, he remembered his way, etape by etape, from
the foliated iron grille of Whitehall to the ancient cannon bedded in
rusting trunnions; and from that mass of Spanish bronze, southward under
the tall palms, past hedges of ve