hat glowed behind
his dark eyes and kept the color mounting and receding in his sunburnt
cheeks. All of which, except the keenness, was a strange thing in a man
who spent half his life shooting big game and exploring. But then, one
imagined that Burnaby on the trail and Burnaby in a town were two
entirely different persons. He liked his life with a thrust to it, and
in a great city there are so many thrusts that, it is to be supposed,
one of Burnaby's temperament hardly has hours enough in a day to
appreciate all of them and at the same time keep appointments.

On this February night, at all events, he was extremely late, even
beyond his custom, and Mrs. Malcolm, having waited as long as she
possibly could, sighed amusedly and told her man to announce dinner.
There were only three others besides herself in the drawing-room,
Masters--Sir John Masters, the English financier--and his wife, and
Mrs. Selden, dark, a little silent, with a flushed, finely cut face and
a slightly sorrow-stricken mouth. And already these people had reached
the point where talk is interesting. People did in Mrs. Malcolm's house.
One went there with anticipation, and came away with the delightful, a
little vague, exhilaration that follows an evening where the perfection
of the material background--lights, food, wine, flowers--has been almost
forgotten in the thrill of contact with real persons, a rare enough
circumstance in a period when the dullest people entertain the most. In
the presence of Mrs. Malcolm even the very great forgot the suspicions
that grow with success and became themselves, and, having come once,
came again vividly, overlooking other people who really had more right
to their attentions than had she.

This was the case with Sir John Masters. And he was a very great man
indeed, not only as the world goes but in himself: a short, heavy man,
with a long, heavy head crowned with vibrant, still entirely dark hair
and pointed by a black, carefully kept beard, above which arose--"arose"
is the word, for Sir John's face was architectural--a splendid, slightly
curved nose--a buccaneering nose; a nose that, willy-nilly, would have
made its possessor famous. One suspected, far back in the yeoman strain,
a hurried, possibly furtive marriage with gypsy or Jew; a sudden
blossoming into lyricism on the part of a soil-stained Masters.
Certainly from somewhere Sir John had inherited an imagination which was
not insular. Dangerous men, these Sir