“It must be a very engrossing study,” remarked Mrs. Jacks, with her most intelligent air.  “Dante opens such a world.”

“Strange!” murmured her husband, with his kindly smile.  “The last thing I should have imagined.”

They were summoned to luncheon.  As they entered the dining-room, there appeared a young man whom Mr. Jacks greeted warmly.

“Hullo, Arnold!  I am so glad you lunch here to-day.  Here is the son of my old friend Jerome Otway.”

Arnold Jacks pressed the visitor’s hand and spoke a few courteous words in a remarkably pleasant voice.  In physique he was quite unlike his father; tall, well but slenderly built, with a small finely-shaped head, large grey-blue eyes and brown hair.  The delicacy of his complexion and the lines of his figure did not suggest strength, yet he walked with a very firm step, and his whole bearing betokened habits of healthy activity.  In early years he had seemed to inherit a very feeble constitution; the death of his brother and sister, followed by that of their mother at an untimely age, left little hope that he would reach manhood; now, in his thirtieth year, he was rarely on troubled the score of health, and few men relieved from the necessity of earning money found fuller occupation for their time.  Some portion of each day he spent at the offices of a certain Company, which held rule in a British colony of considerable importance.  His interest in this colony had originated at the time when he was gaining vigour and enlarging his experience in world-wide travel; he enjoyed the sense of power, and his voice did not lack weight at the Board of the Company in question.  He had all manner of talents and pursuits.  Knowledge—­the only kind of knowledge he cared for, that of practical things, things alive in the world of to-day—­seemed to come to him without any effort on his part.  A new invention concealed no mysteries from him; he looked into it; understood, calculated its scope.  A strange piece of news from any part of the world found him unsurprised, explanatory.  He liked mathematics, and was wont to say jocosely that an abstract computation had a fine moral affect, favouring unselfishness.  Music was one of his foibles; he learnt an instrument with wonderful facility, and, up to a certain point, played well.  For poetry, though as a rule he disguised the fact, he had a strong distaste; once, when aged about twenty, he startled his father by observing that “In Memoriam” seemed to him a shocking instance of wasted energy; he would undertake to compress the whole significance of each section, with its laborious rhymings, into two or three lines of good clear prose.  Naturally the young man had undergone no sentimental troubles; he had not yet talked of marrying, and cared only for the society of mature women who took common-sense views of life.  His religion was the British Empire; his saints, the men who had made it; his prophets, the politicians and publicists who held most firmly the Imperial tone.