by many women. His hair
was black, and was parted in the front. His forehead, though low,
was broad. His eyes were dark and bright, and his eyebrows were very
full, and perfectly black. At those periods of his anger, all his
face which was not scar, was eye and eyebrow. He wore a thick black
moustache, which covered his mouth, but no whiskers. People said of
him that he was so proud of his wound that he would not grow a hair
to cover it. The fact, however, was that no whisker could be made to
come sufficiently forward to be of service, and therefore he wore
none.

The story of that wound should be told. When he was yet hardly more
than a boy, before he had come up to London, he was living in a
house in the country which his father then occupied. At the time
his father was absent, and he and his sister only were in the house
with the maid-servants. His sister had a few jewels in her room, and
an exaggerated report of them having come to the ears of certain
enterprising burglars, a little plan was arranged for obtaining them.
A small boy was hidden in the house, a window was opened, and at the
proper witching hour of night a stout individual crept up-stairs in
his stocking-feet, and was already at Kate Vavasor's door,--when,
in the dark, dressed only in his nightshirt, wholly unarmed, George
Vavasor flew at the fellow's throat. Two hours elapsed before the
horror-stricken women of the house could bring men to the place.
George's face had then been ripped open from the eye downwards, with
some chisel, or house-breaking instrument. But the man was dead.
George had wrenched from him his own tool, and having first jabbed
him all over with insufficient wounds, had at last driven the steel
through his windpipe. The small boy escaped, carrying with him two
shillings and threepence which Kate had left upon the drawing-room
mantelpiece.

George Vavasor was rather low in stature, but well made, with small
hands and feet, but broad in the chest and strong in the loins. He
was a fine horseman and a hard rider; and men who had known him well
said that he could fence and shoot with a pistol as few men care to
do in these peaceable days. Since volunteering had come up, he had
become a captain of Volunteers, and had won prizes with his rifle at
Wimbledon.

Such had been the life of George Vavasor, and such was his character,
and such his appearance. He had always lived alone in London, and did
so at present; but just now his sister