though, in the intervals of energy, no one gave a more complete impression of imperturbable drifting on the tides of the moment.  Altogether, he was rather a paradox.  He chose to live in that little Chelsea house which had a scrap of garden rather than in the Temple or St. James’s, because he often preferred solitude; and yet he was an excellent companion, with many friends, who felt for him the affectionate distrust inspired by those who are prone to fits and starts of work and play, conviviality and loneliness.  To women, he was almost universally attractive.  But if he had scorched his wings a little once or twice, he had kept heart-free on the whole.  He was, it must be confessed, a bit of a gambler, the sort of gambler who gets in deep, and then, by a plucky, lucky plunge, gets out again, until some day perhaps—­he stays there.  His father, a diplomatist, had been dead fifteen years; his mother was well known in the semi-intellectual circles of society.  He had no brothers, two sisters, and an income of his own.  Such was Bryan Summerhay at the age of twenty-six, his wisdom-teeth to cut, his depths unplumbed.

When he started that morning for the Temple, he had still a feeling of extraordinary lightness in his limbs, and he still saw that face—­its perfect regularity, its warm pallor, and dark smiling eyes rather wide apart, its fine, small, close-set ears, and the sweep of the black-brown hair across the low brow.  Or was it something much less definite he saw—­an emanation or expression, a trick, a turn, an indwelling grace, a something that appealed, that turned, and touched him?  Whatever it was, it would not let him be, and he did not desire that it should.  For this was in his character; if he saw a horse that he liked, he put his money on whatever it ran; if charmed by an opera, he went over and over again; if by a poem, he almost learned it by heart.  And while he walked along the river—­his usual route—­he had queer and unaccustomed sensations, now melting, now pugnacious.  And he felt happy.

He was rather late, and went at once into court.  In wig and gown, that something “old Georgian” about him was very visible.  A beauty-spot or two, a full-skirted velvet coat, a sword and snuff-box, with that grey wig or its equivalent, and there would have been a perfect eighteenth-century specimen of the less bucolic stamp—­the same strong, light build, breadth of face, brown pallor, clean and unpinched cut of lips, the same slight insolence and devil-may-caredom, the same clear glance, and bubble of vitality.  It was almost a pity to have been born so late.