the tied hair and continental buff, it might have been a replica of himself.  It was curious—­that dark strain of Welsh blood, cropping out undiminished, concrete, after generations.  The one to hold it before Howat had been burned in Mary’s time, in the sixteenth century, dead almost three hundred years.  Jasper had a sudden, vivid sense of familiarity with the Howat who had married some widow or other.  His mind returned to his own, peculiar problem, to Essie Scofield, to the burden with which he had encumbered himself, the payment that faced him for—­for his sheer youth.  He said abruptly, belated: 

“You fit the present formal ease of society, Stephen; you like it and it likes you.  In a superficial way I have done well enough, but underneath—­” his voice sank into silence.  A profound, familiar dejection seized him; incongruously he thought of Miss Brundon’s delicate shrinking from the mere contact of the amenities of speech.  Super-sensitive.  “I must go,” he announced, and refused Stephen Jannan’s invitation for the night.

“Stay for some supper, anyhow,” the other insisted, and, a hand on his arm, led him past the doors open upon the dancing.

Chandeliers, great coruscating pendants of glass prisms and candles, glittered above the expanse of whirling crinoline and blue coats, vermilion turbans, gilt feathers and flowered hair.  The light fell on shoulders as white and elegantly sloping as alabaster vases, draped in rose and citron, in blanched illusion frosted and looped with silver; on bouquets of camellias swinging from jewelled chains against ruffled and belled skirts swaying about the revealed symmetry of lacy silk stockings and fragile slippers.  “Ah, Jasper,” Stephen Jannan said; “in our time, what!  Do you remember your first Wellington boots?  The gambling room and veranda at Saratoga?  Tender eyes, old boy, and little tapering hands.”  Jasper Penny replied, “It seems my hair is grey.”  Silence fell on them as they entered the dining room.  A long table was burdened with elaborate pagodas of spun barley sugar topped with sprigs of orange blossom, the moulded creams of a Charlotte Polonaise, champagne jelly valanced with lemon peel, pyramids of glazed fruits on lacquered plates; with faintly iridescent Belleek and fluted glass and ormolu; and, everywhere, the pale multitudinous flames of candles and the fuller radiance of astral lamps hung with lustres.  Jasper Penny idly tore open a bon bon wrapped in a verse on fringed paper,

“Viens!  Viens! ange du ciel, je t’aime! je t’aime!  Et te le dire ici, c’est le bonheur supreme.”

Love and the great hour of life!  He had missed both; one, perhaps, with the other.  His marriage to Phebe, except for a brief flare at the beginning, had been as empty as the affair with Essie Scofield.  God, how hollow living seemed!  He had missed something; or else existence was an ugly deception, the false lure of an incomprehensible jest.  The music beat in faint, mocking waves on his hearing,