n's legs, his dandified
hat a little to one side, those strange, chaffing, goggling eyes, that
look, as if making a perpetual bet. Yes--the very same teasing, now
moody, now reckless, always astute Johnny Dromore, with a good heart
beneath an outside that seemed ashamed of it. Truly to have shared
a room at school--to have been at College together, were links
mysteriously indestructible.

"Mark Lennan! By gum! haven't seen you for ages. Not since you turned
out a full-blown--what d'you call it? Awfully glad to meet you, old
chap!" Here was the past indeed, long vanished in feeling and thought
and all; and Lennan's head buzzed, trying to find some common interest
with this hunting, racing man-about-town.

Johnny Dromore come to life again--he whom the Machine had stamped with
astute simplicity by the time he was twenty-two, and for ever after left
untouched in thought and feeling--Johnny Dromore, who would never pass
beyond the philosophy that all was queer and freakish which had not to
do with horses, women, wine, cigars, jokes, good-heartedness, and that
perpetual bet; Johnny Dromore, who, somewhere in him, had a pocket of
depth, a streak of hunger, that was not just Johnny Dromore.

How queer was the sound of that jerky talk!

"You ever see old Fookes now? Been racin' at all? You live in Town?
Remember good old Blenker?" And then silence, and then another spurt:
"Ever go down to 'Bambury's?' Ever go racin'? . . . Come on up to my
'digs.' You've got nothin' to do." No persuading Johnny Dromore that a
'what d'you call it' could have anything to do. "Come on, old chap. I've
got the hump. It's this damned east wind."

Well he remembered it, when they shared a room at 'Bambury's'--that hump
of Johnny Dromore's, after some reckless spree or bout of teasing.

And down that narrow bye-street of Piccadilly he had gone, and up into
those 'digs' on the first floor, with their little dark hall, their Van
Beers' drawing and Vanity Fair cartoons, and prints of racehorses, and
of the old Nightgown Steeplechase; with the big chairs, and all
the paraphernalia of Race Guides and race-glasses, fox-masks and
stags'-horns, and hunting-whips. And yet, something that from the first
moment struck him as not quite in keeping, foreign to the picture--a
little jumble of books, a vase of flowers, a grey kitten.

"Sit down, old chap. What'll you drink?"

Sunk into the recesses of a marvellous chair, with huge arms of tawny
leather, he li