Manuel of Poictesme, appeared droll. There was, for one thing, no sensible compulsion upon that red-haired young fellow thus to be defiling clean paper with oak-gall, when he might at that very instant be comfortably drunk at the Vartreys’ dinner, or he might be getting pleasurable excitement out of the turns of fortune at Dorn’s gaming-parlors, or he might be diverting himself in his choice of four bedrooms with a lively companion.

But, instead, he sat alone with bookshelves rising stuffily to every side of him,—rather low bookshelves upon the tops of which were perched a cherished horde of porcelain and brass figures representing one or another beast or fowl or reptile. Among the shiny toys, which in themselves attested his childishness, the young fellow sat of his own accord thus lonely. And his antics, incontestably, were queer. He fidgeted. He shifted his rump. He hunched downward, as if with a sudden access of rage, over the paper before him. He put back his head, to stare intently at a white china hen. He pulled at the lobe of his left ear; and he then rather frantically scratched the interior of this ear with his little finger.

Between these bodily exercises he, who was so precariously seated upon the crust of a planet teetering unpredictably through space, was making upon the paper before him, with his much nibbled-at black pen, small scratches, the most of which he presently canceled with yet other scratches, all the while with the air of a person who was about something intelligent and of actual importance. The spectacle was queer; it was unspeakably irrational: for, as always, to an onlooker, the motions of creative writing revealed that flavor of the grotesque which is attendant upon every form of procreation.

Yet it was upon a graver count that Gerald felt honestly sorry for the inheritor of Gerald Musgrave’s natural body. For Gerald was giving up his life out of deference to the code of a gentleman with rather more of relief than he had permitted the Sylan to suspect. And the poor devil who had so rashly taken over this life would—howsoever acute his diabolical intelligence,—he too would, in the end, Gerald reflected, be powerless against that unreasonable Evelyn Townsend and that even more unreasonable code of a gentleman.

Nobody, Gerald’s thoughts ran on, now that he had found a rather beautiful idea to play with, nobody who had not actually indulged in the really dangerous dalliance of adultery in Lichfield could quite understand the hopelessness of the unfortunate fiend’s position. For in the chivalrous Lichfield of 1805 adultery had 

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