ural gift of understanding his fellow-creatures, which, along with
his finer brain, little by little placed him in the noble but
unenviable position of being the first person to whom his friends flew
to be extricated from their scrapes. He had found that his gift stood
him in such good stead in his varying fortunes that he spared no pains
to equip Tinker with the faculty even more finely developed.

In forming Tinker's manners he was at once aided and hindered by many
women. The faithful Selina, with all the best-hearted intentions in
the world of spoiling the child, was foiled, partly by Sir Tancred's
watchfulness, and partly by the uncertainty of her own temper. She was
liable to the sudden, gusty rages of her class; and one of these rages
undid the harm of many days' indulgence. When, however, Tinker was
nine, she resigned with many misgivings, tears, and upbraidings of
conscience, her charge of him, to marry a middle-aged Parisian
hairdresser of Scotch nationality and the name of Angus McNeill. Sir
Tancred had far more trouble with the women who fell in love with him;
and many women fell in love with him or thought themselves in love with
him, for his handsome, melancholy face, his reputation for
recklessness, and above all for his cold insensibility to their charm.
In ten years of the strenuous, smart life, his name was never coupled
with that of any woman. All and each of these made a pet of Tinker,
since they found it the surest way to abate his father's coldness. On
the other hand the great ladies of the Faubourg de St. Germain petted
him because his seraph's face and delightful manners charmed them;
while any nice woman petted him because she could not help it.

Fortunately Tinker did not like being petted; his sentiments, indeed,
on the matter of being kissed by the effusive verged on the ungallant.
He liked to be a nice woman's familiar friend; his attitude toward her
could be almost avuncular; but if a woman would pet him, he endured it
with the exquisite patience with which his father forever taught him to
treat the sex. In weaker hands than those of his father, he would
doubtless have become a precocious and irritating monkey, always and
painfully in evidence. But Sir Tancred and his creditors saw to it
that his life in the world was broken by spells of healthy, boyish
life, and he remained modest enough and simple-hearted.

As to his nerves, though they were always high-strung, the effects of
h