, carefully brushed hair, a
little thin on the top, but with that peculiar gloss seen on the hair of
some men about town. His clothes were unostentatiously perfect. Such men
may be seen in Piccadilly at any hour of the day or night. He had
been intended for the Guards, but had failed to pass the necessary
examination, through no fault of his own, owing to a constitutional
inability to spell. Had he been his younger brother Gerald, he would
probably have fulfilled the Pendyce tradition, and passed into the Army
as a matter of course. And had Gerald (now Captain Pendyce) been George
the elder son, he might possibly have failed. George lived at his club
in town on an allowance of six hundred a year, and sat a great deal in a
bay-window reading Ruff's "Guide to the Turf."

He raised his eyes from the menu and looked stealthily round. Helen
Bellew was talking to his father, her white shoulder turned a little
away. George was proud of his composure, but there was a strange longing
in his face. She gave, indeed, just excuse for people to consider her
too good-looking for the position in which she was placed. Her figure
was tall and supple and full, and now that she no longer hunted was
getting fuller. Her hair, looped back in loose bands across a broad low
brow, had a peculiar soft lustre.

There was a touch of sensuality about her lips. The face was too broad
across the brow and cheekbones, but the eyes were magnificent--ice-grey,
sometimes almost green, always luminous, and set in with dark lashes.

There was something pathetic in George's gaze, as of a man forced to
look against his will.

It had been going on all that past summer, and still he did not know
where he stood. Sometimes she seemed fond of him, sometimes treated him
as though he had no chance. That which he had begun as a game was now
deadly earnest. And this in itself was tragic. That comfortable ease
of spirit which is the breath of life was taken away; he could think
of nothing but her. Was she one of those women who feed on men's
admiration, and give them no return? Was she only waiting to make her
conquest more secure? These riddles he asked of her face a hundred
times, lying awake in the dark. To George Pendyce, a man of the world,
unaccustomed to privation, whose simple creed was "Live and enjoy,"
there was something terrible about a longing which never left him for a
moment, which he could not help any more than he could help eating, the
end of which