waistcoat. A white tube-rose in his buttonhole might have been
intended as a sort of compliment to the occasion, or an indication
of his intention to take a walk after supper in the fashionable
purlieus of the neighbourhood. Facing him sat his sister - a
fluffy-haired, blue-eyed young lady, pretty in her way, but chiefly
noticeable for a peculiar sort of self-consciousness blended with
self-satisfaction, and possessed only at a certain period in their
lives by young ladies of her age. It was almost the air of the cat
in whose interior reposes the missing canary, except that in this
instance the canary obviously existed in the person of the young
man who sat at her side, introduced formally to the household for
the first time. That young man's name was - at the moment - Mr.
Spencer Fitzgerald.

It seems idle to attempt any description of a person who, in the
past, had secured a certain amount of fame under a varying
personality; and who, in the future, was to become more than ever
notorious under a far less aristocratic pseudonym than that by
which he was at present known to the inhabitants of Daisy Villa.
There are photographs of him in New York and Paris, St. Petersburg
and Chicago, Vienna and Cape Town, but there are no two pictures
which present to the casual observer the slightest likeness to one
another. To allude to him by the name under which he had won some
part, at least, of the affections of Miss Maud Barnes, Mr. Spencer
Fitzgerald, as he sat there, a suitor on probation for her hand, was
a young man of modest and genteel appearance. He wore a blue serge
suit - a little underdressed for the occasion, perhaps; but his tie
and collar were neat; his gold-rimmed spectacles - if a little
disapproved of by Maud on account of the air of steadiness which
they imparted - suggested excellent son-in-lawlike qualities to Mr.