“Therefore, treat him as if he were the Double Duchess—God bless her!—herself, even though his name is … I say, Tomps, what is the bounder's name?”
“Preserved Higgins, m'lud!”
The earl collapsed.
“Gracious me!” he exclaimed.
And from beneath his bushy white eyebrows he stole a glance at the possessor of the extraordinary name who was playing poker with two other men, the earl's sons by every last sign of physiognomy, in a corner of the vast, funereal, threadbare Tudor hall that gave on the sweet, yellow Sussex Downs, with a distant view of the sea that sparkled like a floor of emeralds. In back of the castle, toward Lewes and the Brighton & South Coast Railway, stretched thirty odd thousand acres of mixed farm and park land—mortgaged to the last brick, the last thatch, the last Tree of Heaven, the last, moss covered all-the-year-round—which, to quote the earl, had been in the possession of his family, the Wades of Dealle, “long before the Conqueror stuck his ugly Norman nose across the Channel.”
Last night Mr. Preserved Higgins had motored down from his palatial stucco monstrosity in London's Mayfair, with a letter from Redder, his lordship's agent, to “'ave a look at the plyce. That's my w'y o' doin' business. I looks, I tykes my choice, and I p'ys my tin, wot?”
Mr. Preserved Higgins was a remarkable man in more ways than one. Of course he was a self-made
