Into the tin pannikin of the old blind man outside Devonshire House he dropped a shilling. It was clearly a day for silver largesse, for light and love and lingering. He smiled at the thought of the absurdity of his own position. Something like one hundred and twenty pounds stood between him and absolute destitution. What would the passers-by think if they knew,—Lady Tanagra Elton, for instance, who had just driven by? What would she say? What would?
"Hullo, Drew!" he broke off his speculations suddenly, as a tall, fair-haired man was about to pass him.
Fixing his monocle in his right eye, Lord Drewitt gazed at his cousin with expressionless face.
"My dear Richard," he drawled, "I invariably cut the family skeleton during the Season. Ghosts I never acknowledge, even in August, when my social standard is at its lowest ebb."
Beresford laughed, linked his arm in that of his cousin and turned him westward.
"Anyhow, you've got to take me into the club and give me a barley-water," he said.
Although different in temperament and character in about as many ways as two men can differ, Beresford and his cousin had always been on the best of terms. Lord Drewitt's pose of frank cynicism, softened by a certain dry humour, was to Beresford always amusing.
"To give a man a title and two thousand a year on which to keep it out of the mud," Lord Drewitt
