“And do you know her husband?” she asked.  She turned her beautiful eyes to his pale face.

“I’ve never seen him,” said Jimmy.  “But I should think he’s a brute from what I’ve heard about him.  He—­he—­oh, he treated her rottenly.”

“What a shame!” Christine half turned and looked after Cynthia Farrow’s retreating figure.  “Jimmy, wouldn’t you be proud of such a beautiful wife?”

Jimmy laughed, rather a mirthless laugh.

“Penniless beggars like me don’t marry beautiful wives like—­like Miss Farrow,” he said with a sort of savagery.  “They want men with pots and pots of money, who can buy them motor-cars and diamonds, and all the rest of it.”  His voice was hurt and angry.  Christine looked puzzled.  She walked on a little way silently.  Then: 

“I shouldn’t mind how poor a man was if I loved him,” she said.

Jimmy looked down at her.  Her face was half-hidden by the soft brown fur she wore, but he could just get a glimpse of dark lashes against her pale cheek, and the dainty outline of forehead and cheek.

“You won’t always think that,” he told her cynically.  “Some day, when you’re older and wiser than you are now, you’ll find yourself looking at the L. s. d. side of a man, Christine.”

“I never shall,” she cried out indignantly.  “Jimmy, you are horrid!”

But Jimmy Challoner did not smile.

“Women are all the same,” he told her darkly.

Oh, he was very, very young indeed, was Jimmy Challoner!

CHAPTER IV

JIMMY GETS NEWS

There was a letter from the “Great Horatio” on Jimmy’s plate the following morning.  Jimmy looked at the handwriting and the foreign stamp and grimaced.

The Great Horatio seldom wrote unless something were the matter.  He was a good many years older than Jimmy, and Jimmy held him in distinct awe.

He finished his breakfast before he even thought of breaking the seal, then he took up the letter and carried it over with him to the fire.

Jimmy Challoner was breakfasting in his dressing-gown.  It was very seldom that he managed to get entirely dressed by the time breakfast was ready.  He sat down now in a big chair and stuck his slippered feet out to the warmth.

He turned his brother’s letter over and over distastefully.  What the deuce did the old chap want now? he wondered.  He gave a sigh of resignation, and broke open the flap.

He and the Great Horatio had not met for two years.

Horatio Ferdinand Challoner, to give him his full name, was a man whose health, or, rather, ill-health, was his hobby.

All his life he had firmly believed himself to be in a dying state; all his life he had lived more or less at Spas, or on the Riviera, or at health resorts of some kind or another.

He was a nervous, irritable man, as unlike Jimmy as it is possible for two brothers to be.