sively for a minute or two, and said, in English:

"You've got a kink in your nose, Bob--if it weren't for that you'd
be a deuced good-looking fellow--like me; but you ain't."

"Thanks--anything else?" said I.

"Well, I've got a kink in my birth, you see--and that's as big a
kill-joy as I know. I hate it!"

It _was_ hard luck. He would have made such a splendid Marquis of
Whitby! and done such honor to the proud old family motto:

"Roy ne puis, prince ne daigne, Rohan je suis!"

Instead of which he got himself a signet-ring, and on it he caused
to be engraved a zero within a naught, and round them:

"Rohan ne puis, roi ne daigne. Rien ne suis!"

Soon it became pretty evident that a subtle change was being wrought
in him.

He had quite lost his power of feeling the north, and missed it
dreadfully; he could no longer turn his back-somersault with ease
and safety; he had overcome his loathing for meat, and also his
dislike for sport--he had, indeed, become a very good shot.

But he could still hear and see and smell with all the keenness of a
young animal or a savage. And that must have made his sense of being
alive very much more vivid than is the case with other mortals.

He had also corrected his quick impulsive tendency to slap faces
that were an inch or two higher up than his own. He didn't often
come across one, for one thing--then it would not have been
considered "good form" in her Majesty's Household Brigade.

When he was a boy, as the reader may recollect, he was fond of
drawing lovely female profiles with black hair and an immense black
eye, and gazing at them as he smoked a cigarette and listened to
pretty, light music. He developed a most ardent admiration for
female beauty, and mixed more and more in worldly and fashionable
circles (of which I saw nothing whatever); circles where the
heavenly gift of beauty is made more of, perhaps, than is quite good
for its possessors, whether female or male.

He was himself of a personal beauty so exceptional that incredible
temptations came his way. Aristocratic people all over the world
make great allowance for beauty-born frailties that would spell ruin
and everlasting disgrace for women of the class to which it is my
privilege to belong.

Barty, of course, did not confide his love-adventures to me; in this
he was no Frenchman. But I saw quite enough to know he was more
pursued than pursuing; and what a pursuer, to a man built like that!
no innocent, i