th her?"

"Do?" Feather repeated. "What is it people 'do' with babies? I don't
know. I wouldn't touch her for the world. She frightens me."

Coombe said:

"She is staring at me. There is antipathy in her gaze." He stared back
unwaveringly also, but with a sort of cold interest.

"The Head of the House of Coombe" was not a title to be found in Burke
or Debrett. It was a fine irony of the Head's own. The peerage recorded
him as a marquis and added several lesser attendant titles.

To be born the Head of the House is a weighty and awe-inspiring
thing--one is called upon to be an example.

"I am not sure what I am an example of--or to," he said, on one
occasion, in his light, rather cold and detached way, "which is why I at
times regard myself in that capacity with a slightly ribald lightness."

A reckless young woman once asked him:

"Are you as wicked as people say you are?"

"I really don't know. It is so difficult to decide," he answered.
"Perhaps I am as wicked as I know how to be. And I may have painful
limitations or I may not."

He had reached the age when it was safe to apply to him that vague term
"elderly," and marriage might have been regarded as imperative. But he
had remained unmarried and seemed to consider his abstinence entirely
his own affair.

Courts and capitals knew him, and his opportunities were such as gave
him all ease as an onlooker. He saw closely those who sat with knit
brows and cautiously hovering hand at the great chess-board which is
formed by the map of Europe.

As a statesman or a diplomat he would have gone far, but he had been too
much occupied with Life as an entertainment, too self-indulgent for work
of any order. Having, however, been born with a certain type of brain,
it observed and recorded in spite of him, thereby adding flavour and
interest to existence. But that was all.

Texture and colour gave him almost abnormal pleasure. For this reason,
perhaps, he was the most perfectly dressed man in London.

It was at a garden-party that he first saw Feather. When his eyes fell
upon her, he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking.
Some one standing quite near him said afterwards that he had, for a
second or so, became pale--almost as if he saw something which
frightened him. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to
him. But he had not talked to her for fifteen minutes before he knew
that there was no real reason why he should ever again lo