"I'm being simply prudent," said Frank. "A contented heart--"

Jack thrust a cup of tea and the buttered buns before him.

* * * * *

These two were as nearly brothers as possible, in everything but blood.
Their homes lay within ten miles of one another. They had gone to a
private school together, to Eton, and to Trinity. They had ridden
together in the holidays, shot, dawdled, bathed, skated, and all the
rest. They were considerably more brothers to one another than were
Frank and Archie, his actual elder brother, known to the world as
Viscount Merefield. Jack did not particularly approve of Archie; he
thought him a pompous ass, and occasionally said so.

For Frank he had quite an extraordinary affection, though he would not
have expressed it so, to himself, for all the world, and a very real
admiration of a quite indefinable kind. It was impossible to say why he
admired him. Frank did nothing very well, but everything rather well; he
played Rugby football just not well enough to represent his college; he
had been in the Lower Boats at Eton, and the Lent Boat of his first year
at Cambridge; then he had given up rowing and played lawn-tennis in the
summer and fives in the Lent Term just well enough to make a brisk and
interesting game. He was not at all learned; he had reached the First
Hundred at Eton, and had read Law at Cambridge--that convenient branch
of study which for the most part fills the vacuum for intelligent
persons who have no particular bent and are heartily sick of classics;
and he had taken a Third Class and his degree a day or two before. He
was remarkably averaged, therefore; and yet, somehow or another, there