The toast, was drunk and three cheers were given, with an extra cheer for Mrs. Geoffrey.  The husband, who was no hand at speechmaking, replied—­and his good-natured voice was quite thick with emotion—­that it was awfully good of them all to give his wife and himself such a ripping send-off, and awfully good of Sir George and Lady Everington especially, and awfully good of Count Saito; and that he was the happiest man in the world and the luckiest, and that his wife had told him to tell them all that she was the happiest woman, though he really did not see why she should be.  Anyhow, he would do his best to give her a jolly good time.  He thanked his friends for their good wishes and for their beautiful presents.  They had had jolly good times together, and, in return for all their kindness, he and his wife wanted to wish them all a jolly good time.

So spoke Geoffrey Barrington; and at that moment many people present must have felt a pang of regret that this fine specimen of England’s young manhood should marry an oriental.  He was over six feet high.  His broad shoulders seemed to stoop a little with the lazy strength of a good-tempered carnivore, of Una’s lion, and his face, which was almost round, was set off by a mane of the real lion colour.  He wore his moustache rather longer than was the fashion.  It was a face which seemed ready to laugh at any moment—­or else to yawn.  For there was about the man’s character and appearance something indolent and half-awakened and much of the schoolboy.  Yet he was over thirty.  But there is always a tendency for Army life to be merely a continuation of public-school existence.  Eton merges into Sandhurst, and Sandhurst merges into the regiment.  One’s companions are all the time men of the same class and of the same ideas.  The discipline is the same, the conventionality and the presiding fetish of Good and Bad Form.  So many, generals are perennial school boys.  They lose their freshness, that is all.

But Geoffrey Barrington had not lost his freshness.  This was his great charm, for he certainly was not quick or witty.  Lady Everington said that she kept him as a disinfectant to purify the atmosphere.

“This house,” she declared, “sometimes gets over-scented with tuberoses.  Then I open the window and let Geoffrey Barrington in!”

He was the only son of Lord Brandan and heir to that ancient but impoverished title.  He had been brought up to the idea that he must marry a rich wife.  He neither jibbed foolishly at the proposal, nor did he surrender lightly to any of the willing heiresses who threw themselves at his head.  He accepted his destiny with the fatalism which every soldier must carry in his knapsack, and took up his post as Mars in attendance in Lady Everington’s drawing-room, recognising that there lay the strategic point for achieving his purpose.  He was not without hope, too, that besides obtaining the moneybags he might be so fortunate as to fall in love with the possessor of them.