round, was set off by a mane of the real lion colour. He wore his
moustache rather longer than was the fashion. It was a face which
seemed ready to laugh at any moment--or else to yawn. For there
was about the man's character and appearance something indolent and
half-awakened and much of the schoolboy. Yet he was over thirty. But
there is always a tendency for Army life to be merely a continuation
of public-school existence. Eton merges into Sandhurst, and Sandhurst
merges into the regiment. One's companions are all the time men of
the same class and of the same ideas. The discipline is the same,
the conventionality and the presiding fetish of Good and Bad Form. So
many, generals are perennial school boys. They lose their freshness,
that is all.

But Geoffrey Barrington had not lost his freshness. This was his great
charm, for he certainly was not quick or witty. Lady Everington said
that she kept him as a disinfectant to purify the atmosphere.

"This house," she declared, "sometimes gets over-scented with
tuberoses. Then I open the window and let Geoffrey Barrington in!"

He was the only son of Lord Brandan and heir to that ancient but
impoverished title. He had been brought up to the idea that he must
marry a rich wife. He neither jibbed foolishly at the proposal, nor
did he surrender lightly to any of the willing heiresses who threw
themselves at his head. He accepted his destiny with the fatalism
which every soldier must carry in his knapsack, and took up his post
as Mars in attendance in Lady Everington's drawing-room, recognising
that there lay the strategic point for achieving his purpose. He was
not without hope, too, that besides obtaining the moneybags he might
be so fortunate as to fall in love with the possessor of them.