He was a beau ideal commissioner.  The native newspaper said so when he first came, having painfully selected the phrase from a “Dictionary Of Polite English for Public Purposes” edited by a College graduate at present in the Andamans.  True, later it had called him an “overbearing and insane procrastinator”—­“an apostle of absolutism”—­and, plum of all literary gleanings, since it left so much to the imagination of the native reader,—­“laudator temporis acti.”  But that the was because he had withdrawn his private subscription prior to suspending the paper sine die under paragraph so-and-so of the Act for Dealing with Sedition; it could not be held to cancel the correct first judgment, any more than the unmeasured early praise had offset later indiscretion.  Beau ideal must stand.

It was not his first call at the Blaines’ house, although somehow or other he never contrived to find Dick Blaine at home.  As a bachelor he had no domestic difficulties to pin him down when office work was over for the morning, and, being a man of hardly more than forty, of fine physique, with an astonishing capacity for swift work, he could usual finish in an hour before breakfast what would have kept the routine rank and file of orthodox officials perspiring through the day.  That was one reason why he had been sent to Sialpore—­men in the higher ranks, with a pension due them after certain years of service, dislike being hurried.

He was a handsome man—­too handsome, some said—­with a profile l ike a medallion of Mark Antony that lost a little of its strength and poise when he looked straight at you.  A commissionership was an apparent rise in the world; but Sialpore has the name of being a departmental cul-de-sac, and they had laughed in the clubs about “Irish promotion” without exactly naming judge O’Mally. (Mrs. O’Mally came from a cathedral city, where distaste for the conventions is forced at high pressure from early infancy.)

But there are no such things as political blind alleys to a man who is a judge of indiscretion, provided he has certain other unusual gifts as well.  Sir Roland Samson, K. C. S. I., was not at all a disappointed man, nor even a discouraged one.

Most people were at a disadvantage coming up the path through the Blaines’ front garden.  There was a feeling all the way of being looked down on from the veranda that took ten minutes to recover from in the subsequent warmth of Western hospitality.  But Samson had learned long ago that appearance was all in his favor, and he reenforced it with beautiful buff riding-boots that drew attention to firm feet and manly bearing.  It did him good to be looked at, and he felt, as a painstaking gentleman should, that the sight did spectators no harm.

“All alone?” he asked, feeling sure that Mrs. Blaine was pleased to see him, and shifting the chair beside her as he sat down in order to see her face better.  “Husband in the hills as usual?  I must choose a Sunday next time and find him in.”