CHAPTER I.

DAVID AND JONATHAN.

 

Towards the first week in July two young men were seated in a smoking-carriage on the midday express from Paddington to Reading. They were alone in the compartment, and at the moment there existed between them that peculiar silence of sympathy which can be only the outcome of a perfect friendship. The Jonathan of the pair was slim, tall, and dark, with a military uprightness of bearing, and a somewhat haughty expression on his clean-shaven face. His David was younger in years, but considerably greater in size, and like his namesake of Judah, was ruddy and of a fair countenance. The one was an eager, anxious, highly-strung Celt, with his Irish impulse and impetuosity trained into well-nigh complete obedience by years of experience; the other a phlegmatic Saxon, of small brain and much muscle. Jonathan's nineteenth-century name was Laurence Mallow. David answered to the title of Lord Aldean. They had been tutor and pupil respectively, and they were still fast friends. The elder possessing the stronger and more imperious will, continued to control the younger.

Mallow was not popular, nor did he wish to be so. He chose to be feared rather than loved. He was brilliantly clever, and, therefore, had many admirers; on the other hand, his intolerance of stupidity lost him many friends, so that to his expressed satisfaction he moved more or less isolated amid a crowd of fair-spoken, back-biting acquaintances. And yet perhaps it was a knowledge of the guarded manner in which he was received that made him cling the more to the solitary friend he possessed. People thought and people said that there was but little about good-natured, thick-headed Aldean to attract the brilliant young Irishman. There were those who went so far as to hint that the boy's title and wealth explained all that, albeit Mallow was well-nigh aggressively independent.

Left an orphan with comparatively little money at an early age, he had won prizes and taken scholarships at a great public school, and had maintained himself at Oxford by these early efforts. He left the University with a full brain and empty pockets, and he had undertaken the tutorship of Aldean to gain breathing-time while he cast around him for choice of a career. When Aldean came of age, Mallow left him, a fair enough scholar and an admirable athlete, and went himself to London. He became a journalist and a power with his pen. He attached himself to a weekly publication of high aim and small circulation, conducted by a genius who had failed to profit by his pen because he could not write 

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