ong as he could remember. In all those years
his pale, rather handsome face had never grown any older; it was
like the pale grey bowler hat which he always wore, winter and
summer--unageing, calm, serenely without expression.

Next him, but separated from him and from the rest of the world by the
almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny Mullion. She was
perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink-and-white complexion, and
wore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over her
ears. In the secret tower of her deafness she sat apart, looking down at
the world through sharply piercing eyes. What did she think of men and
women and things? That was something that Denis had never been able to
discover. In her enigmatic remoteness Jenny was a little disquieting.
Even now some interior joke seemed to be amusing her, for she was
smiling to herself, and her brown eyes were like very bright round
marbles.

On his other side the serious, moonlike innocence of Mary Bracegirdle's
face shone pink and childish. She was nearly twenty-three, but one
wouldn't have guessed it. Her short hair, clipped like a page's, hung in
a bell of elastic gold about her cheeks. She had large blue china eyes,
whose expression was one of ingenuous and often puzzled earnestness.

Next to Mary a small gaunt man was sitting, rigid and erect in
his chair. In appearance Mr. Scogan was like one of those extinct
bird-lizards of the Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his dark eye had the
shining quickness of a robin's. But there was nothing soft or gracious
or feathery about him. The skin of his wrinkled brown face had a dry and
scaly look; his hands were the hands of a crocodile. His movements
were marked by the lizard's disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed; his
speech was thin, fluty, and dry. Henry Wimbush's school-fellow and exact
contemporary, Mr. Scogan looked far older and, at the same time, far
more youthfully alive than did that gentle aristocrat with the face like
a grey bowler.

Mr. Scogan might look like an extinct saurian, but Gombauld was
altogether and essentially human. In the old-fashioned natural histories
of the 'thirties he might have figured in a steel engraving as a type of
Homo Sapiens--an honour which at that time commonly fell to Lord
Byron. Indeed, with more hair and less collar, Gombauld would have
been completely Byronic--more than Byronic, even, for Gombauld was of
Provencal descent, a black-haired young