Bude had spent his life in the service of the English aristocracy. The
Earl of Tipperary, Major-General Lord Bannister, the Dowager Marchioness
of Wiltshire, and Sir Herbert Marcobrunner, Bart., had in turn watched
his gradual progress from pantry-boy to butler. Bude was a man whose
maxim had been the French saying, "_Je prends mon bien ou je le
trouve_."

In his thirty years' service he had always sought to discover and draw
from those sources of knowledge which were at his disposal. From
MacTavish, who had supervised Lord Tipperary's world-famous gardens, he
had learnt a great deal about flowers, so that the arrangement of the
floral decorations was always one of the features at Hartley Parrish's
_soigne_ dinner-parties. From Brun, the unsurpassed _chef_, whom Lord
Bannister had picked up when serving with the Guards in Egypt, he had
gathered sufficient knowledge of the higher branches of the cuisine to
enable Hartley Parrish to leave the arrangement of the menu in his
butler's hands.

Bude would have been the first to admit that, socially speaking, his
present situation was not the equal of the positions he had held. There
was none of the staid dignity about his present employer which was
inborn in men like Lord Tipperary or Lord Bannister, and which Sir
Herbert Marcobrunner, with the easy assimilative faculty of his race,
had very successfully acquired. Below middle height, thick-set and
powerfully built, with a big head, narrow eyes, and a massive chin,
Hartley Parrish, in his absorbed concentration on his business, had no
time for the acquisition or practice of the Eton manner.

It was characteristic of Parrish that, seeing Bude at a dinner-party at
Marcobruaner's, he should have engaged him on the spot. It took Bude a