Queer that his route should take him past the very house to-day, after this new bereavement!  Accursed luck—­that gout which had sent him to Wiesbaden, last September!  Accursed luck that Gyp had ever set eyes on this fellow Fiorsen, with his fatal fiddle!  Certainly not since Gyp had come to live with him, fifteen years ago, had he felt so forlorn and fit for nothing.  To-morrow he would get back to Mildenham and see what hard riding would do.  Without Gyp—­to be without Gyp!  A fiddler!  A chap who had never been on a horse in his life!  And with his crutch-handled cane he switched viciously at the air, as though carving a man in two.

His club, near Hyde Park Corner, had never seemed to him so desolate.  From sheer force of habit he went into the card-room.  The afternoon had so darkened that electric light already burned, and there were the usual dozen of players seated among the shaded gleams falling decorously on dark-wood tables, on the backs of chairs, on cards and tumblers, the little gilded coffee-cups, the polished nails of fingers holding cigars.  A crony challenged him to piquet.  He sat down listless.  That three-legged whist—­bridge—­ had always offended his fastidiousness—­a mangled short cut of a game!  Poker had something blatant in it.  Piquet, though out of fashion, remained for him the only game worth playing—­the only game which still had style.  He held good cards and rose the winner of five pounds that he would willingly have paid to escape the boredom of the bout.  Where would they be by now?  Past Newbury; Gyp sitting opposite that Swedish fellow with his greenish wildcat’s eyes.  Something furtive, and so foreign, about him!  A mess—­if he were any judge of horse or man!  Thank God he had tied Gyp’s money up—­every farthing!  And an emotion that was almost jealousy swept him at the thought of the fellow’s arms round his soft-haired, dark-eyed daughter—­that pretty, willowy creature, so like in face and limb to her whom he had loved so desperately.

Eyes followed him when he left the card-room, for he was one who inspired in other men a kind of admiration—­none could say exactly why.  Many quite as noted for general good sportsmanship attracted no such attention.  Was it “style,” or was it the streak of something not quite typical—­the brand left on him by the past?

Abandoning the club, he walked slowly along the railings of Piccadilly towards home, that house in Bury Street, St. James’s, which had been his London abode since he was quite young—­one of the few in the street that had been left untouched by the general passion for puffing down and building up, which had spoiled half London in his opinion.

A man, more silent than anything on earth, with the soft, quick, dark eyes of a woodcock and a long, greenish, knitted waistcoat, black cutaway, and tight trousers strapped over his boots, opened the door.

“I shan’t go out again, Markey.  Mrs. Markey must give me some dinner.  Anything’ll do.”