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'Ah, Mandeville! Good-morning. Ye're devilish early astir.'

'Not without occasion.' The Captain's manner was grim, almost curt. It was obviously as an afterthought that he bowed and added, a shade less curtly: 'Good-morning.'

Lord William observed him with quickened interest. He knew no man who commanded himself more completely than Robert Mandeville, who more fully conformed with that first canon of good-breeding which demanded that a gentleman should, at all times, in all places and circumstances, control his person and subdue his feelings. Yet here was Mandeville, this paragon of deportment, not only excited, but actually permitting himself to betray the fact. And it was not only his voice that betrayed it. There was a touch of heightened colour in the Captain's clear-cut, clear-skinned, rather arrogant countenance, whilst in his clubbed blond hair there was more than a vestige of last night's powder to advertise the fact that the Captain, usually so irreproachable in these matters, had made a hurried toilet.