It was indeed Captain Derinzy who had passed up the village street. It is needless to say that he had not heard anything of the comments which his appearance had evoked; but had he heard them, they would not have made the smallest difference to him. He was essentially a man of the world, and on persons of his class these things have very little effect. A is irretrievably involved; B has outwritten himself; C is much too intimate with Mrs. D; while D is ruining that wretched young E at _écarté_--so at least say Y and Z; but the earlier letters of the alphabet do not care much about it. They know that the world must be always full of shaves and _cancans_, and, like men versed in the great art of living, they know they must have their share of them, and know how to take them. Captain Derinzy passed up the village street without bestowing one single thought upon that street's inhabitants, or indeed upon anything or anybody within a hundred miles of Beachborough. He looked utterly incongruous to the place, and he felt utterly incongruous to it, and if he were recalled to the fact of its existence, or of his existence in it, by his accidentally slipping over one of the round knobbly stones which supplied the place of a footway, or having to step across one of the wide self-made sluices which, coming from the cottages, discharged themselves into the common kennel, all he did was to wish it heartily at the devil; an aspiration which he uttered in good round rich tones, and without any heed to the feelings of such lookers-on as might be present. See him now, as he steps off the knobbly pavement and strikes across the road, making for the greensward of the cliff, and unconsciously becoming bathed in a halo of sunset glory in his progress. A thin man, of fifty years of age, of middle height, with a neat trim figure, and one of his legs rather lame, with a spare, sallow, fleshless face, high cheek-boned, lantern-jawed, bright black eyes, straight nose, thin lips, not overshadowed, but outlined rather, by a very small crisp black moustache. His hair is blue-black in tint and wiry in substance, so much at least of it as can be seen under a rather heavy brown sombrero hat, which he wears perched on one side of his head in rather a jaunty manner. His dress, a suit of some light-gray material, is well cut, and perfectly adapted for the man and the place; and his boots are excellently made, and fit his small natty feet to perfection. His ungloved hands are lithe and brown; in one of them he carries a crook-headed cane, with which--a noticeable peculiarity--he fences and makes passes at such posts and palings as he encounters on his way. That he was a gentleman born and bred you could have little doubt; little doubt from his carriage of himself, and an indescribable, unmistakable something, that he was, or had been, a military man; no doubt at all that he was entirely out of place in Beachborough, and that he was bored out of his existence.