rs who
had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the other
thought it right to eat men. I beg your pardon--this way, if I remember
right."

"Do you know," said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish
entertainment, as he trotted after us towards the interior, "I can never
quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and
sometimes so reactionary. Are you a modern, Basil?"

"No," said Basil, loudly and cheerfully, as he entered the crowded
drawing-room.

This caused a slight diversion, and some eyes were turned away from our
slim friend with the Oriental face for the first time that afternoon.
Two people, however, still looked at him. One was the daughter of the
house, Muriel Beaumont, who gazed at him with great violet eyes and
with the intense and awful thirst of the female upper class for verbal
amusement and stimulus. The other was Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, who
looked at him with a still and sullen but unmistakable desire to throw
him out of the window.

He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair; everything
from the curves of his smooth limbs to the coils of his silvered hair
suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a
man--the unmistakable, splendid serpentine gentleman we had seen walking
in North London, his eyes shining with repeated victory.

"What I can't understand, Mr Wimpole," said Muriel Beaumont eagerly,
"is how you contrive to treat all this so easily. You say things quite
philosophical and yet so wildly funny. If I thought of such things, I'm
sure I should laugh outright when the thought first came."

"I agree with Miss Beaumont," said Sir Walter, suddenly exploding with
indignation. "If I had thought of anything so futile, I should find it
difficult to keep my countenance."

"Difficult to keep your countenance," cried Mr Wimpole, with an air of
alarm; "oh, do keep your countenance! Keep it in the British Museum."

Every one laughed uproariously, as they always do at an already admitted
readiness, and Sir Walter, turning suddenly purple, shouted out:

"Do you know who you are talking to, with your confounded tomfooleries?"

"I never talk tomfooleries," said the other, "without first knowing my
audience."

Grant walked across the room and tapped the red-moustached secretary on
the shoulder. That gentleman was leaning against the wall regarding
the whole scene with a great deal of gloom; but, I fancied, with very