Alan Hawke. An easy-going patrician of the staff, he was in
the magic circle of the viceroy. The heir to an inevitable fortune, and
already vested with substantially stratified deposits at "Coutts"
and Glyn, Carr and Glyn's, he would have been envied by most luckless
mortals the heavy balances which he always carried at "Grind-lay's," a
fortune for any less fortunate man.

He was already interested in the remarkably fetching looking young woman
at Alan Hawke's left, being a squire of dames par excellence, while
Major Alan Hawke himself wondered how Anstruther had drifted so far away
from the direct line of travel to London.

Thawing visibly under the influence of Hawke's gracefully modulated
camaraderie, the susceptible Anstruther was attentively examining his
fair neighbor in silence, while he tried vaguely to recall some story
which he had once heard, quite detrimental to the cosmopolitan Major.

He gave it up as a bad job! "Hang it!" he thought. "It may have been
some other chap. Very likely!" It was the strange story of a sharp
encounter with the hostile Kookies, in which a couple of English
mountain guns, long before abandoned by a British expeditionary force,
had been served with due professional skill and most desperate dash by
a reckless man, easily recognized as an English refugee artillerist.
The wounded escaped British soldier, who had died after denouncing the
deserting adventurer, had left his parting advice to the Royal Artillery
to burn the fearless renegade, should he ever be captured. It was the
Story of a nameless traitor!

But, the vague distrust of the curled darling of Fortune soon faded away
under Hawke's measured social leading. A silver wine cooler stood behind
their chairs, and the old yarn of a British officer playing Olivier Pain
became very misty under the subtle influence of the Pommery Sec. Alan
Hawke guarded the expected story of his own wanderings, waiting craftily
until Bacchus and Venus had sufficiently mollified Anstruther.

He duplicated the champagne, knowing well the warming influence of
"t'other bottle." The Major of a shadowy rank had early learned the
graceful art of effacing himself, and on this occasion, it stood greatly
to his credit. Anstruther was now quite sure that the graceful head of
the beautiful neighbor swayed in an unconscious recognition of his witty
sallies. A true son of Mars--ardent, headlong, and gallant as regarded
le beau sexe--he talked brilliantly and we