lips.  Now and then a dashing girl came gliding in, and, though the draft was noxious to her, drank the stuff off with a neutral look and well bred indifference to the distress about her.  Or in strode the private secretary of some distinguished being in London, S.W.  He invariably carried his glass to the door, drank it off in languid sips as he leaned indolently against the masonry, and capped the event by purchasing a rose for his buttonhole, so making a ceremony which smacked of federating the world at a common public drinking trough into a little fete.  Or there were the good priests from a turbulent larruping island, who with cheeks blushing with health and plump waistcoats came ambling, smiling, to their thirty ounces of noisome liquor.  Then, there was Baron, the bronzed, idling, comfortable trader from Zanzibar, who, after fifteen years of hide and seek with fever and Arabs and sudden death—­wherewith were all manner of accident and sundry profane dealings not intended for The Times or Exeter hall, comes back to sojourn in quiet “Christom” places, a lamb in temper, a lion at heart, an honest soul who minds his own business, is enemy to none but the malicious, and lives in daily wonder that the wine he drank the night before gets into trouble with the waters drunk in the morning.  And the days, weeks and months go on, but Baron remains, having seen population after population of water drinkers come and go.  He was there years ago.  He is there still, coming every year, and he does not know that George Hagar has hung him at Burlington House more than once, and he remembers very well the pretty girl he did not marry, who also, on one occasion, joined the aristocratic company “on the line.”

This young and pretty girl—­Miss Mildred Margrave—­came and went this morning, and a peculiar, meditative look on her face, suggesting some recent experience, caused the artist to transfer her to his notebook.  Her step was sprightly, her face warm and cheerful in hue, her figure excellent, her walk the most admirable thing about her—­swaying, graceful, lissom—­like perfect dancing with the whole body.  Her walk was immediately merged into somebody else’s—­merged melodiously, if one may say so.  A man came from the pump-room looking after the girl, and Hagar remarked a similar swaying impulsion in the walk of both.  He walked as far as the gate of the pump-room, then sauntered back, unfolded a newspaper, closed it up again, lit a cigar, and, like Hagar, stood watching the crowd abstractedly.  He was an outstanding figure.  Ladies, as they waited, occasionally looked at him through their glasses, and the Duchess of Brevoort thought he would make a picturesque figure for a reception—­she was not less sure because his manner was neither savage nor suburban.  George Hagar was known to some people as “the fellow who looks back of you.”  Mark Telford might have been spoken of as “the man who looks through you,” for, when he did glance at a man or woman, it was with keen directness,