And so, scarcely had the last reverberation of Bude's measured gonging
died away than the French window leading from the lounge-hall on to the
terrace was pushed open and two of Hartley Parrish's guests emerged from
the falling darkness without into the pleasant comfort of the firelit
room.

They were an oddly matched pair. The one was a tubby little man with
short bristly grey hair and a short bristly grey moustache to match. His
stumpy legs looked ridiculous in his baggy golf knickers of rough tweed,
which he wore with gaiters extending half-way up his short, stout
calves. As he came in, he slung off the heavy tweed shooting-cloak he
had been wearing and placed it with his Homburg hat on a chair.

This was Dr. Romain, whose name thus written seems indecently naked
without the string of complementary initials indicative of the honours
and degrees which years of bacteriological research had heaped upon him.
His companion was a tall, slim, fair-haired young man, about as good a
specimen of the young Englishman turned out by the English public school
as one could find. He was extremely good-looking with a proud eye and
finely chiselled features, but the suggestion of youth in his face and
figure was countered by a certain poise, a kind of latent seriousness
which contrasted strangely with the general cheery _insouciance_ of his
type.

A soldier would have spotted the symptoms at once, "Five years of war!"
would have been his verdict--that long and strange entry into life of so
many thousands of England's manhood which impressed the stamp of
premature seriousness on all those who came through. And Captain Sir
Horace Trevert, Bart., D.S.O., had gone from his famous school straight
into a famous regiment, had won his decoration before he was twenty-one,