It was not part of Mr. Arbuthnot’s philosophy to refuse any little choice morsel that the world, artistic, intellectual, or physical, thought fit to offer him. He was a handsome man verging on his thirtieth year: tawny-bearded, fair, with hands that Titian or Velasquez might have loved to paint, and a profile of the type commonly known as Bourbon. (Although he may not play the first part in this or any other drama, one has a feeling that Gaston should advance to the footlights, make his bow, a good minute before his fellow-actors leave the slips.) His eyes were shrewd and near together, their colour and their expression alike prone to shift if a stranger sought, too persistently, to investigate them. With a first look you felt sure that Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot bore a brain. You felt equally sure, with a second, that the opinion was shared, even to exaggeration, by Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot himself. In dress it was his pleasure to affect Bohemianism. On this particular June morning Gaston wore a brown velveteen coat, a spun silk shirt, a white sombrero hat--the well-tailored man becoming only more conspicuous under the disguise. What smaller things shall be said of him? That he had been brought up as a child in Paris, the only son of a valetudinarian American widow, and spoke French to this hour with a better accent than English, rolling his ‘r’s’ and clipping his vowels like a born denizen of the boulevards. Item: that he had a fair English girl for his wife; item: a loyal, rough-hewn Scottish cousin for his friend--the Dinah and Geoffrey who, breakfasting with appetite although their discourse was of sentiment, made up the paradoxical little group under the lime trees at which we have glanced. Let us turn to Geoffrey next, leaving Dinah, as I see they leave the first actress in the theatrical advertisements, for the bottom of the list. The cousinship of the Arbuthnots might be divined at a glance, although, reviewed feature by feature, the two men were notably unlike in their likeness. Both were tall, both were wiry of build, both held their heads high, going along life’s road as though the world, taken from whichever point of view you liked, were decidedly a place worth living in. Here the likeness ended. Gaston, indeed, would declare that by virtue of his mother’s Yankee blood, and his own Parisian instincts, they were less related, physically, than any ordinary cousin-germans. One overwhelming difference between them was patent. Geoffrey was no beauty-man! When he was the freshest of freshmen, five or six years before the morning of this Guernsey breakfast, Geff went in, one November night, for a little bit of guerilla fighting in the Cambridge streets, which, without quenching the guerilla spirit, effectually left a beauty-spoiling brand upon himself for the remainder of his life.