"And after him?"

"The Lord knows! Anybody; the first person you meet if you walk down Piccadilly perhaps; perhaps you, perhaps the prime minister. Honestly, I haven't any idea."

"Marry then, at once," said Geoffrey, "and disappoint the man in the street, and the prime minister, your uncle, and me."

Harry Vail got up and stood with his back to the fire, stretching out his long-fingered hands to the blaze behind him.

"What advice!" he said. "You might as well advise me to have a Greek nose. Some people have it, some do not; it is fate."

"Marriage is a remarkably common fate," remarked Geoffrey, "commoner than a Greek nose. I have seen many married people without it."

"It is commoner for certain sorts of people," said Harry; "but you know I——" and he stopped.

"Well?" asked the other.

"I am not of those sorts—the sorts who go smiling through the world and are smiled on in return. It was always the same with me. I am not truculent, or savage, or sulky, I believe, but somehow I remain friendless. I should be a hermit if there were any nowadays."

"Liver!" said Geoffrey decidedly. "The fellow of twenty-one who says that sort of thing about himself has got liver. 'Self-Analysis, or[Pg 8] the Sedentary Life,' a tract by Geoffrey Langham. Here endeth the gospel."

[Pg 8]

Harry smiled.

"I don't think about my character, as a rule," he said. "I don't lead a sedentary life, and I haven't got liver. But if one is a recluse it is as well to recognise the fact. I haven't got any real friends like everybody else."

"Thank you," said Geoffrey; "don't apologize."

"I shall if I like; indeed, I think I will. No one but a friend would have come down here."

"Oh, I don't know about that," said the other; "I would stay with people I positively loathed for shooting no worse than we had to-day. In the matter of friends, what you said was inane. You might have heaps of friends if you chose. But you don't find friends by going into a room alone and locking the door behind you."

"Ah! I do that, do I?" said Harry, with a certain eager interest in his tone.

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