containing well-bound editions of Alken, Surtees, and others, and, let into an alcove of that one of them which included the fireplace, a substantial safe. Le Sage knew it was there, though it was hidden from sight behind a shallow curtain; and now, as he moved humming about the room, his hands behind his back, his eyes scrutinising a picture or two while he awaited his host’s coming, he gravitated gradually toward its place of concealment. Arrived there, he lifted very delicately, and still humming, the hem of the curtain, just exposed the keyhole, and bent to examine it with singular intentness. But a moment later, when the General entered, he was contemplating a coaching print by Flavell over the mantelpiece. 

 “Indifferent art, I suppose you will admit,” he said. “But there is something picturesquely direct about these old Sporting pieces.” 

 “Well, they suit me,” answered Sir Calvin, “because I understand them. Red’s red and blue’s blue to me, and if any artist tells me they are not, I’ve nothing to answer the fellow but that he’s a damned liar.” 

 Le Sage laughed—“What is the colour of a black eye, then?”—and they settled down to their game. The General was a good player; all the best of his mental qualifications—which were otherwise of the standard common among retired officers of an overbearing, obstinate, and undiscerning disposition—were displayed in his astute engineering of his small forces. He was a tactical Napoleon in miniature when it came to chess; he seemed to acquire then a reason and a dignity inconspicuous in his dealings with living people. The chess-men could not misrepresent him; their movements were his movements, and their successes or failures his. If he lost, he had no one but himself he could possibly blame, and his understanding of that condition seemed to bring out the best in him. He was never choleric over the fortunes of the game. For the rest, he was not a wise man, or an amenable man, or anything but a typical despot of his class, having an inordinate pride of family, which owed less than it should have to any moral credit he had brought it in the past. In person he was a leanish, clean-built soldier of fifty-five, with bullying eyebrows and a thick blunt moustache of a grizzled blonde. 

 He and the Baron were very fond of devising problems, which they would send up for solution to the Morning Post. They set to elaborating a tough one now, a very difficult changed-mate two-mover, which kept them absorbed and occupied over the board for a considerable time. Indeed, a full hour and a half had passed before they had settled 

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