Hyde Park barracks, could not console Cecil for fog,
wind, mud, oyster-vendors, bad odors, and the uproar and riff-raff of
the streets; specially when his throat was as dry as a lime-kiln,
and his longing for the sight of a cheroot approaching desperation.
Unlimited sodas, three pipes smoked silently over Delphine Demirep's
last novel, a bath well dashed with eau de cologne, and some glasses of
Anisette after the fatigue-duty of unharnessing, restored him a little;
but he was still weary and depressed into gentler languor than ever
through all the courses at a dinner party at the Austrian Embassy,
and did not recover his dejection at a reception of the Duchess of
Lydiard-Tregoze, where the prettiest French Countess of her time asked
him if anything was the matter.

"Yes!" said Bertie with a sigh, and a profound melancholy in what the
woman called his handsome Spanish eyes, "I have had a great misfortune;
we have been on duty all day!"

He did not thoroughly recover tone, light and careless though his temper
was, till the Zu-Zu, in her diamond-edition of a villa, prescribed Creme
de Bouzy and Parfait Amour in succession, with a considerable amount
of pine-apple ice at three o'clock in the morning, which restorative
prescription succeeded.

Indeed, it took something as tremendous as divorce from all forms of
smoking for five hours to make an impression on Bertie. He had the most
serene insouciance that ever a man was blessed with; in worry he did not
believe--he never let it come near him; and beyond a little difficulty
sometimes in separating too many entangled rose-chins caught round him
at the same time, and the annoyance of a miscalculation on the flat, or
the ridge-and-furrow, when a Maldon or Danebury favorite came nowhere,
or his book was wrong for the Grand National, Cecil had no cares of any
sort or description.

True, the Royallieu Peerage, one of the most ancient and almost one of
the most impoverished in the kingdom, could ill afford to maintain its
sons in the expensive career on which it had launched them, and
the chief there was to spare usually went between the eldest son, a
Secretary of Legation in that costly and charming City of Vienna, and
the young one, Berkeley, through the old Viscount's partiality; so that,
had Bertie ever gone so far as to study his actual position, he would
have probably confessed that it was, to say the least, awkward; but then
he never did this, certainly never did it thoro