before, but had heard of him often during the last three or four months since the Englishman “blew into” Lucky Star City.  He was a boaster as well as a waster, no doubt; for according to himself, he knew “everybody at home,” from the King down the whole gamut of the British peerage.  Also he “claimed” to be an Oxford man, and it was that which, in this emergency, had focused Nick’s attention upon him.

The landlord, aware that Nick had a “proposition” to make, excused himself when he had brought off the introduction; and the two men were left more or less alone at their end of the hotel veranda.  Nevertheless, so complicated was the nature of Nick’s business that he wished for greater privacy, and he suggested a stroll in the direction of the gusher.

“You’re an Oxford graduate, aren’t you?” he began.

“Ya-as, I went up to Oxford from Eton,” drawled Jerrold with an accent which Nick disliked, but was ready to believe in as well-bred, because few Englishmen to the “manner born” had happened to come his way.  “All the elder sons of my family, since the days of Charles the Second, don’t you know, have gone in for the Army; and that’s what I should have liked, but my eldest brother has the money as well as the title, d’you see, and I’m only third son.  I——­”

“Yes,” said Nick curtly.  “But you mustn’t worry to tell me all your private affairs unless you really want to.  Because what I’m most interested in is the Oxford part.  I never went to college, nor to any school for the matter of that, except a night one, but I’ve tried to make up a bit with reading all I could.  I suppose I don’t know much about books, compared with you——­”

“Oh, I was never much of a grind,” the other cut in hastily.  “I went in for other things.  I was cox——­“.

“It’s etiquette I’m thinking of,” Nick confessed humbly.  “You’d be born knowin’ a lot about that, I dare say, in your family.  And then, being at Oxford, too!  I always notice college men have a different way from those who haven’t been to any university.  It’s hard to explain the difference, but it’s there.”

“Oh, rather,” agreed the Englishman.  “You know our King himself will send all his sons to Oxford and Cambridge.  Nothin’ like it, my dear fellow, what?  Our family——­”

“Could you give lessons, sort of object-lessons, in what to do and what not do in society?” inquired Nick, eager yet shy, not ashamed of his motive in asking, but fearful by instinct that he was not getting hold of the right man.

“Nothing easier,” returned Montagu Jerrold, the prominent gooseberries, which were his eyes, looking somewhat less thoroughly boiled.  “I was thinkin’ of leavin’ this beastly hole, don’t you know.  Nothin’ in it for a gentleman, what?  But if you’ve somethin’ to offer worth takin’, why I might stick it out for a bit, I dessay.”

Nick longed to box the’ creature’s ears; but they were well-shaped and might be the ears of a man born with etiquette flowing with his blue blood, through azure veins.  The shape of his nose wasn’t bad, but those eyes and that chin!  They were, as Nick grimly expressed it to himself, the limit.  Nevertheless, he would persevere, and try a course of lessons from the Dook.