THEODORE DE BERGERAC and Harold Jerningham were friends of thirty years’ standing. There was some distant relationship between them--some remote cousinship arising from the marriage of an exiled Jerningham of Jacobite principles with a De Bergerac, in the reign of George the Second. But this inscrutable cousinship had nothing to do with the friendship between the two men. _That_ was a sincere and spontaneous affection, such as exists now and then between two people as different from each other as it is possible for creatures of the same species to be. Harold was ten years younger than his friend in actual years, and his senior by a century in all qualities of heart and mind. The elder man retained the freshness and simplicity of a child at sixty years of age; the younger had parted with every attribute of youth before the advent of his twenty-fifth birthday. Both were highly gifted: but one had scattered the treasures of intellect on every road, and wasted the powers of his brain in a hundred ignoble pursuits; while the other had enriched his mind unconsciously in the calm seclusion of a scholar’s retreat. An angel might have read the innermost secrets of Theodore de Bergerac’s heart, and would have found therein no taint of earthly grossness; but there had been times when devils might have rejoiced in the thoughts of Harold Jerningham. And yet the two men were friends, and had preserved an unbroken friendship for nearly thirty years. A Philip of Orleans, steeped to the very lips in the poisonous teaching of a Dubois, will in the hour of his deepest degradation respect the purity of childhood. Before the stainless robes of perfect innocence the most hardened profligate bows his head and covers his face, ashamed of the vices he is wont to be proud of--softened, melted, vanquished by that invincible purity. Thus it had been with Harold Jerningham. For this world-weary, hardened sinner the simple-minded scholar was sacred as a child. De Bergerac knew nothing of that Jerningham of the bachelor’s house in Park Lane: Jerningham the irresistible, the man who was an exile from the houses of careful fathers and devoted husbands; the man whose life would have furnished subject-matter for half a dozen romances and more than one tragedy. When Harold Jerningham entered his friend’s house he put away the baser half of himself. A little cynical, a little bitter, a little hard and worldly he must needs be, even in that innocent society; but Jerningham the free-thinker and the profligate melted into thin air on the threshold of Theodore de Bergerac’s dwelling.