black skullcap on his flowing gray hair; looking one moment like the traditional doctor of the Italian puppet-play, gaunt, long-fingered, long-featured, his thin, pallid face a study in gray amid its black surroundings; and the next, playing the man of family and cosmopolitan travel, that he actually was.  Faversham indeed began before long to find a curious attraction in his society.  There was flattery, moreover, in the fact that nobody else in living memory had Melrose ever been known to pay anything like the attention he was now daily devoting to his invalid guest.  The few inmates and visitors of the Tower, permanent and temporary, became gradually aware of it.  They were astonished, but none the less certain that Melrose had only modified his attitude for some selfish reason of his own which would appear in due time.

The curious fact, however, emerged, after a while, that between the two men, so diverse in age, history, and circumstance, there was a surprising amount in common.  Faversham, in spite of his look of youth, much impaired for the present by the results of his accident, was not so very young; he had just passed his thirtieth birthday, and Melrose soon discovered that he had seen a good deal both of the natural and the human worlds.  He was the son, it seemed, of an Indian Civil Servant, and had inherited from his parents, who were both dead, an income—­so Melrose shrewdly gathered from various indications—­just sufficient to keep him; whereby a will, ambitious rather than strong, had been able to have its way.  He had dabbled in many things, journalism, law, politics; had travelled a good deal; and was now apparently tired of miscellaneous living, and looking out discontentedly for an opening in life—­not of the common sort—­that was somewhat long in presenting itself.  He seemed to have a good many friends and acquaintances, but not any of overmastering importance to him; his intellectual powers were evidently considerable, but not working to any great advantage either for himself or society.

Altogether an attractive, handsome, restless fellow; persuaded that he was destined to high things, hungry for them, yet not seeing how to achieve them; hungry for money also—­probably as the only possible means of achieving them—­and determined, meanwhile, not to accept any second best he could help.  It was so, at least—­from the cynical point of view of an observer who never wasted time on any other—­that Melrose read him.

Incidentally he discovered that Faversham was well acquainted with the general lines and procedure of modern financial speculation, was in fact better versed in the jargon and gossip of the Stock Exchange than Melrose himself; and had made use now and then of the large amount of information and the considerable number of useful acquaintances he possessed to speculate cautiously on his own account—­without much result, but without disaster.  Also it was very soon clear that, independently of his special reasons for knowing something about engraved gems and their value, he had been, through his Oxford uncle, much brought across collectors and collecting.  He could, more or less, talk the language of the tribe, and indeed his mere possession of the famous gems had made him, willy-nilly, a member of it.