eceiving any very hearty acknowledgment, and who now advanced alone to
pay his respects to his host. This was Commandant O'Brien, of the
French Foreign Legion. He was a slim yet somewhat swaggering figure,
clean-shaven, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, and, as seemed natural in an
officer of that famous regiment of victorious failures and successful
suicides, he had an air at once dashing and melancholy. He was by birth
an Irish gentleman, and in boyhood had known the Galloways--especially
Margaret Graham. He had left his country after some crash of debts, and
now expressed his complete freedom from British etiquette by swinging
about in uniform, sabre and spurs. When he bowed to the Ambassador's
family, Lord and Lady Galloway bent stiffly, and Lady Margaret looked
away.

But for whatever old causes such people might be interested in each
other, their distinguished host was not specially interested in them. No
one of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the evening. Valentin
was expecting, for special reasons, a man of world-wide fame, whose
friendship he had secured during some of his great detective tours and
triumphs in the United States. He was expecting Julius K. Brayne, that
multi-millionaire whose colossal and even crushing endowments of small
religions have occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity for
the American and English papers. Nobody could quite make out whether Mr.
Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist; but he was
ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was
an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait for the American
Shakespeare--a hobby more patient than angling. He admired Walt Whitman,
but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, Pa., was more "progressive"
than Whitman any day. He liked anything that he thought "progressive."
He thought Valentin "progressive," thereby doing him a grave injustice.

The solid appearance of Julius K. Brayne in the room was as decisive
as a dinner bell. He had this great quality, which very few of us
can claim, that his presence was as big as his absence. He was a huge
fellow, as fat as he was tall, clad in complete evening black, without
so much relief as a watch-chain or a ring. His hair was white and well
brushed back like a German's; his face was red, fierce and cherubic,
with one dark tuft under the lower lip that threw up that otherwise
infantile visage with an effect theatrical and even Mephistophelean. N