entertainment.

"In the name of goodness, why?" I asked puzzled.

"There was a troupe of Japanese acrobats," said he. "In the course of a
roving life one picks up picturesque acquaintances. Hosimura, the head of
them, is a capital fellow."

This he told me later, for our friendship, begun when he was eight years
old, had leaped into sudden renewal; but without any idea of exciting my
commiseration. Yet it made me think.

That a prospective Brigadier-General should find his sole relief from
solitude in the fugitive companionship of a Japanese acrobat seemed to me
pathetic.

Meanwhile there he was at Mansfield Court, lean and unlovely, but, as I
divined, lovable in his unaffected simplicity, the very model of a British
field-officer. At dinner on Saturday evening, he had sat between his
hostess and Lady Auriol Dayne. To the former he had talked of the things
she most loved to hear, the manifold virtues of her son. There were
fallings away from the strict standards of military excellence, of course;
but he touched upon them with his wide, charming smile, condoned them with
the indulgence of the man prematurely mellowed who has kept his hold on
youth, so that Lady Verity-Stewart felt herself in full sympathy with
Charles's chief, and bored the good man considerably with accounts of the
boy's earlier escapades. To Lady Auriol he talked mainly about the war, of
which she appeared to have more complete information than he himself.

"I suppose you think," she said at last with a swift side glance, "that I'm