Now the germinal spot of this veracious history consists in the fact that numbered amongst Mr James Hancock's most prized clients was a young gentleman of the name of Bevan; the gentleman, in short, whom Miss Fanny Lambert described as "frightfully rich and a beast." Mr Charles Maximilian Bevan, to give him his full title, inhabited a set of chambers in the "Albany," midway between the Piccadilly end and the end opening upon Vigo Street. He was a young man of about twenty-three years of age, of a not unpleasing but rather heavy appearance, absolutely unconscious of the humour that lay in himself or in the world around him, and possessed of a fine, furious, old-fashioned temper; a temper that would burst out over an ill-cooked beef steak or a missing stud, and which vented itself chiefly upon his valet Strutt. In most of us the port of our ancestors runs to gout; in Mr Bevan it ran to temper. He was a bachelor. Hamilton Cox, the author of "The Pillar of Salt," once said that the Almighty had appointed Charles Bevan to be a bachelor, and that he had taken up his appointment. To his friends it seemed so, and it seemed a pity, for he was an orphan and very wealthy, and had no unpleasant vices. He possessed Highshot Towers and five thousand acres of land in the richest part of Buckinghamshire, a moor in Scotland which he let each autumn to a man from Chicago, and a house in Mayfair which he also let. Mr Bevan was not exactly a miser, but he was careful; no cabman ever received more from him than his legal fare; he studied the city news in the _Times_ each morning, and Strutt was kept informed as to the price of Consols by the state of his master's temper, also as to the dividends declared by the Great Northern, South Eastern, London North Western Railways, and the Glasgow Gas Works, in all of which concerns Mr Bevan was a heavy holder. In his life he had rarely been known to give a penny to a beggar man, yet each year he gave a good many pounds to the Charity Organisation Society, and the Hospitals, feeling sure that money invested in these institutions would not be misspent, and might even, perhaps, bear some shadowy dividend in the life to come. He had a horror of cardsharpers, poets, foreigners, inferior artists, and badly dressed people in general--every one, in fact, beyond the pale of what he was pleased to call "Respectability"--but beyond all these and above all these, he had a horror of spendthrifts.