ith
the pair of them, and a char-creature of some sort, he would do very
well for a few weeks. Nevertheless, I hardly thought that, in the end,
he would be braced up to the effort of coming, and I should not have
been surprised to receive a wire:

Rather than move, Terry has cut his throat in the Japanese garden.

Which shows that despite all past experiences, I little knew my
Caroline!

Captain Burns--late of the American Flying Corps--did come; and what is
more, he called at my flat before he had been fifteen minutes in his
own. This he did because Mrs. Carstairs had begged him to bring a small
parcel which he must deliver by hand to me personally. She had
telegraphed, asking me to stop at home--quite a favour in this wonderful
summer, even though it was July, the season proper had passed; but I
couldn't refuse, as I'd tacitly promised to brighten the man. So there I
sat, in my favourite frock, when he was ushered into the drawing room.

Dame Caroline had told me that "Terry" was good-looking, but her
description had left me cold, and somehow or other I was completely
unprepared for the real Terry Burns.

Yes, _real_ is the word for him! He was so real that it seemed odd I had
gone on all my life without having known there was this Terence Burns.
Not that I fell in love with him. Just at the moment I was much occupied
in trying to keep alight an old fire of resentment against a man who had
saved my life; a "forty-fourth cousin four times removed" (as he called
himself), Sir James Courtenaye. But when I say "real," I mean he was one
of those few people who would seem important to you if you passed him in
a crowd. You would tell yourself regretfully that there was a friend
you'd missed making: and you would have had to resist a strong impulse
to rush back and speak to him at any price.

If, at the first instant of meeting, I felt this strong personal
magnetism, or charm, or whatever it was, though the man was down
physically at lowest ebb, what would the sensation have been with him at
his best?

He was tall and very thin, with a loose-boned look, as if he ought to be
lithe and muscular, but he came into the room listlessly, his shoulders
drooping, as though it were an almost unbearable bore to put one foot
before another. His pallor was of the pathetic kind that gives an odd
transparence to deeply tanned skin, almost like a light shining through.
His hair was a bronzy brown, so immaculately brushed back fr