to the Galloways without receiving any very hearty acknowledgment,
and who now advanced alone to pay his respects to his host. This
was Commandant O'Brien, of the French Foreign Legion. He was a
slim yet somewhat swaggering figure, clean-shaven, dark-haired,
and blue-eyed, and, as seemed natural in an officer of that famous
regiment of victorious failures and successful suicides, he had an
air at once dashing and melancholy. He was by birth an Irish
gentleman, and in boyhood had known the Galloways--especially
Margaret Graham. He had left his country after some crash of
debts, and now expressed his complete freedom from British
etiquette by swinging about in uniform, sabre and spurs. When he
bowed to the Ambassador's family, Lord and Lady Galloway bent
stiffly, and Lady Margaret looked away.

But for whatever old causes such people might be interested in
each other, their distinguished host was not specially interested
in them. No one of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the
evening. Valentin was expecting, for special reasons, a man of
world-wide fame, whose friendship he had secured during some of
his great detective tours and triumphs in the United States. He
was expecting Julius K. Brayne, that multi-millionaire whose
colossal and even crushing endowments of small religions have
occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity for the
American and English papers. Nobody could quite make out whether
Mr. Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist;
but he was ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so
long as it was an untried vessel. One of his hobbies was to wait
for the American Shakespeare--a hobby more patient than angling.
He admired Walt Whitman, but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of
Paris, Pa., was more "progressive" than Whitman any day. He liked