the Canon inspired this command, but
the Grafin had been genuinely charmed. She adored good music and she was
unaffectedly fond of good-looking boys.

Ronnie went back to the piano and tasted the matured pleasure of a
repeated success. Any measure of nervousness that he may have felt at
first had completely passed away. He was sure of his audience and he
played as though they did not exist. A renewed clamour of excited
approval attended the conclusion of his performance.

"It is a triumph, a perfectly glorious triumph," exclaimed the Duchess of
Dreyshire, turning to Yeovil, who sat silent among his wife's guests;
"isn't it just glorious?" she demanded, with a heavy insistent intonation
of the word.

"Is it?" said Yeovil.

"Well, isn't it?" she cried, with a rising inflection, "isn't it just
perfectly glorious?"

"I don't know," confessed Yeovil; "you see glory hasn't come very much my
way lately." Then, before he exactly realised what he was doing, he
raised his voice and quoted loudly for the benefit of half the room:

"'Other Romans shall arise,
Heedless of a soldier's name,
Sounds, not deeds, shall win the prize,
Harmony the path to fame.'"

There was a sort of shiver of surprised silence at Yeovil's end of the
room.

"Hell!"

The word rang out in a strong young voice.

"Hell! And it's true, that's the worst of it. It's damned true!"

Yeovil turned, with some dozen others, to see who was responsible for
this vigorously expressed statement.

Tony Luton confronted him, an angry scowl on his face, a blaze in his
heavy-lidded eyes. The boy was without a conscience, almost without a
soul, as priests and parsons reckon souls, but there was a slumbering
devil-god within him, and Yeovil's taunting words had broken the slumber.
Life had been for Tony a hard school, in which right and wrong, high
endeavour and good resolve, were untaught subjects; but there was a
sterling something in him, just that something that helped poor street-
scavenged men to die brave-fronted deaths in the trenches of Salamanca,
that fired a handful of apprentice boys to shut the gates of Derry and
stare unflinchingly at grim leaguer and starvation. It was just that
nameless something that was lacking in the young musician, who stood at
the further end of the room, bathed in a flood of compliment and
congratulation, enjoying the honey-drops of his triumph.

Luton pushed his way through the crowd and left the roo