chett"--might for an observer
have seemed immediately to offer support to her changed state.

IV

Lord Petherton, a man of five-and-thirty, whose robust but symmetrical
proportions gave to his dark blue double-breasted coat an air of
tightness that just failed of compromising his tailor, had for his main
facial sign a certain pleasant brutality, the effect partly of a bold
handsome parade of carnivorous teeth, partly of an expression of nose
suggesting that this feature had paid a little, in the heat of youth,
for some aggression at the time admired and even publicly commemorated.
He would have been ugly, he substantively granted, had he not been
happy; he would have been dangerous had he not been warranted. Many
things doubtless performed for him this last service, but none so much
as the delightful sound of his voice, the voice, as it were, of another
man, a nature reclaimed, supercivilised, adjusted to the perpetual
"chaff" which kept him smiling in a way that would have been a mistake
and indeed an impossibility if he had really been witty. His bright
familiarity was that of a young prince whose confidence had never had to
falter, and the only thing that at all qualified the resemblance was the
equal familiarity excited in his subjects.

Mr. Mitchett had so little intrinsic appearance that an observer would
have felt indebted for help in placing him to the rare prominence of
his colourless eyes and the positive attention drawn to his chin by the
precipitation of its retreat from discovery. Dressed on the other hand
not as gentlemen dress in London to pay their respects to the fair, he
excited by the exhibition of garments that had nothing in common save
the violence and the independence of their pattern a belief that in the
desperation of humility he wished to render public his having thrown to
the winds the effort to please. It was written all over him that he
had judged once for all his personal case and that, as his character,
superficially disposed to gaiety, deprived him of the resource of
shyness and shade, the effect of comedy might not escape him if secured
by a real plunge. There was comedy therefore in the form of his pot-hat
and the colour of his spotted shirt, in the systematic disagreement,
above all, of his coat, waistcoat and trousers. It was only on long
acquaintance that his so many ingenious ways of showing he appreciated
his commonness could present him as secretly rare.

"And where's the