taking his cigar from his mouth as he stopped, and flicking
the ashes away, while he stood looking at me with an expression of
sympathy which he struggled in vain, I saw, to dissemble. On his finely
coloured, though rather impassive features, there was the same darkening
of a carefully suppressed emotion--the same lines of anger drawn, not by
temper, but by suffering--that I had seen first at the club when his
favourite hunter had died, and next on the day when the General had
spoken to him, in my presence, of my engagement to Sally. Under his
short dark mustache, his thin, nervous lips were set closely together.

"I'm awfully cut up, Ben," he said, "I declare I don't know when I was
ever so cut up about anything before."

"I'm cut up too, George, like the deuce, but it doesn't appear to help
matters, somehow."

"That's the worst thing about being a man of affairs like you--or like
Uncle George," he observed, making an amiable effort to assure me that
even in the hour of adversity, I still held my coveted place in the
General's class; "when the crash comes, you big ones have to pay the
piper, while the rest of us small fry manage to go scot-free."

It was put laboriously, but beneath the words I felt the force of that
painful sympathy, too strong for concealment, and yet not strong enough
to break through the inherited habit of self-command. The General had
broken through, I acknowledged, but then was not the very greatness of
the great man the expression of an erratic departure from traditions
rather than of the perfect adherence to the racial type?

"And the louder the music the bigger the cost of the piper," I observed,
with a laugh.

"Oh, you'll come out all right," he rejoined cheerfully, "things are
never so bad as they might be."

"Well, I don't know that there's much comfort in reflecting that a
thunder-storm might have been accompanied by an earthquake."

For a moment he stood in silence watching the end of his cigar, which
went out in his hand. Then without meeting my eyes he asked in a voice
that had a curiously muffled sound:--

"It's rough on Sally, isn't it? How does she stand it?"

"As she stands everything--like an angel out of heaven."

"Yes, you're right--she is an angel," he returned, still without looking
into my face. An instant later, as if in response to an impulse which
for once rose superior to the dead weight of custom, he blurted out with
a kind of suffering violence, "I say, Ben,