The Earl of Bude, whose name at once occurred to Merton, was a remarkable personage.  The world knew him as rich, handsome, happy, and a mighty hunter of big game.  They knew not the mysterious grief that for years had gnawed at his heart.  Why did not Bude marry?  No woman could say.  The world, moreover, knew not, but Merton did, that Lord Bude was the mysterious Mr. Jones Harvey, who contributed the most original papers to the Proceedings of the Geographical and Zoological Societies, and who had conferred many strange beasts on the Gardens of the latter learned institution.  The erudite papers were read, the eccentric animals were conferred, in the name of Mr. Jones Harvey.  They came from outlandish addresses in the ends of the earth, but, in the flesh, Jones Harvey had been seen by no man, and his secret had been confided to Merton only, to Logan, and two other school friends.  He did good to science by stealth, and blushed at the idea of being a F.R.S.  There was no show of science about Bude, and nothing exotic, except the singular circumstance that, however he happened to be dressed, he always wore a ring, or pin, or sleeve links set with very ugly and muddy looking pearls.  From these ornaments Lord Bude was inseparable; to chaff about presents from dusky princesses on undiscovered shores he was impervious.  Even Merton did not know the cause of his attachment to these ungainly jewels, or the dark memory of mysterious loss with which they were associated.

Merton’s first care was to visit the divine Althaea, Mrs. Brown-Smith, and other ladies of his acquaintance.  Their cards were deposited at the claim staked out by Miss McCabe in Berkeley Square, and that young lady soon ‘went everywhere,’ and publicly confessed that she ’was having a real lovely time.’  By a little diplomacy Lord Bude was brought acquainted with Miss McCabe.  She consented to overlook his possession of a coronet; titles were, to this heroine, not marvels (as to some of her countrywomen and ours), but rather matters of indifference, scarcely even suggesting hostile prejudice.  The observers in society, mothers and maids, and the chroniclers of fashion, soon perceived that there was at least a marked camaraderie between the elegant aristocrat, hitherto indifferent to woman, untouched, as was deemed, by love, and the lovely Child of Freedom.  Miss McCabe sat by him while he drove his coach; on the roof of his drag at Lord’s; and of his houseboat at Henley, where she fainted when the crew of Johns Hopkins University, U. S., was defeated by a length by Balliol (where Lord Bude had been the favourite pupil of the great Master).  Merton remarked these tokens of friendship with approval.  If Bude could be induced to enter for the great competition, and if he proved successful, there seemed no reason to suppose that Miss McCabe would be dissatisfied with the People’s choice.