opposite enjoying them greatly.

For they were both eminently good to look upon;--Margaret, tall and
slender, and of a most gracious figure and bearing, with thoughtful,
dark-blue eyes, a very charming face accentuated by the
characteristics of her northern descent, and a wealth of shining brown
hair coiled about her shapely head;--Graeme, tall, clean-built, of an
outdoor complexion, with nothing of the student about him save his
deep, reflective eyes, and the little lines in the corners which
wrinkled up so readily at the overflowing humours of life.

It was Charles Pixley--Charles Svendt Pixley, to accord him fullest
justice, which I am most anxious to do--who brought her, and to that
extent we are his debtors.

Though why Pixley should be a Whitefriar passes one's comprehension.
His pretensions to literature were, I should say, bounded by his Stock
Exchange notebook and his betting-book. He had not even read Graeme's
latest, though it was genuinely in its second--somewhat
limited--edition, and he did not even smile affably when Adam Black
introduced them. Graeme, however, had no fault to find with him for
that. There were others in like dismal case.

Pixley nodded cursorily at the introduction, with a
"How-d'ye-do-who-the-deuce-are-you?" expression on his face. He struck
Graeme as not bad-looking, in a somewhat over-fed and self-indulgent
fashion, and inclined to superciliousness and self-complacency, if not
to actual superiority and condescension. It occurred to him afterwards
that this might arise from his absorption in his companion, for he
turned again at once to Miss Brandt and began chattering like a lively