Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/33

 lean, with angular jowl, high cheekbones, thin lips that subtended a quixotic nose, and keen, black eyes: altogether un-English; un-English, too, as to sulky, brooding, saturnine temper and sudden fits of withering, black taciturnity—all mental and physical characteristics which tradition was pleased to blame on a Castilian admiral whose ship had been wrecked on the chalky coast of Sussex at the time when the proud Armada had tried issues with Good Queen Bess and her duffel-jerkined yoemenyeomen [sic].

Both brothers knew why Mr. Higgins was an honored guest at Dealle Castle and lent themselves to their share of the entertaining with good enough grace. They belonged to the same regiment, the Ninety-Second Dragoons, of which their father was the retired colonel and the history of which was intimately connected with that of Britain's Oriental dominions; and they thought that the verbal and social vagaries of the eccentric Cockney-South-African millionaire would make good telling at regimental mess, over the famous crusty port which had once reposed in the cellars of Napoleon the First.

Too, in the case of the older brother, there was a more strictly selfish reason.

For he was head over heels in debt. A three-cornered combination of race horses, cards and a chorus lady who called herself Gwendolyn de Vere, had eaten into his resources like acid, and Sam Lewis, the usurer of Lombard Street, had flatly refused to renew his last note for five thousand guineas. Bankruptcy, disgrace, cashiering from the army stared him in the face.

“Sorry, my boy,” his father had told him that very