But Mr. St. Maur was not to be shaken off so easily. This gentleman, who had spelt his name “Maher” in his native city of “Dahblin” (as he was accustomed to pronounce it), was the son of a decent butter-merchant, who had put him to the Bar. Coming over to the Temple, in accordance with old custom to keep his terms, the ambitious youth was surprised and charmed to find that his membership of the Roman Church, which had stood somewhat in his light in the society of the Irish capital, was here a fashionable distinction. To drink the Roman Pontiff’s health before that of the British Sovereign appeared to be in some mysterious way a passport to Court favour, and a Roman missionary had just been given precedence over the heads of the English Church. The policy of the Primrose League had been adapted to the purposes of proselytism, and a club had been founded in the West End in which the middle-class aspirant could enjoy the privilege of lunching in the same room as a Roman Cabinet Minister and receiving the _Times_ fresh from the hands of a Roman Duke. Unfortunately the Duke and the Cabinet Minister failed to play their parts with sufficient zeal, or else there were not enough of them to go around, and St. Bridget’s Club gradually sunk from depth to depth till not merely Protestants, but Jews, profaned its portals, and it became a refuge for all the suspicious characters whom other clubs refused. Young Maher was not long in deciding to forsake the Irish Bar for the English, and a slight alteration in the spelling of his name enabled him to pose as an offshoot of one of the greatest families in Britain. The difficulty of an accent which clove obstinately to his tongue was met by a well-constructed legend of an Irish branch of the family in question, supposed to have settled in the Emerald Isle about the time of Strongbow. On the strength of this genealogy, which would have done credit to the Heralds’ College in its best remunerated moments, Mr. St. Maur was in the habit of referring to a nobleman of lofty rank as “the head of our house,” thereby causing intolerable anguish to his friends, the Vanes, who were only nephews of a baronet. Unfortunately they were prevented from questioning the genuineness of St. Maur’s pedigree, inasmuch as they had laid every stress upon it in introducing him to their acquaintance. But they had an uneasy sense that the Irishman was an impostor who had beaten them by mere bluff. On his part the barrister having, as he conceived, surpassed the Vanes, was seeking for loftier heights to scale. As soon as he met Lord Alistair Stuart in the brothers’ flat he promptly marked him out for attack. Undaunted by Stuart’s evident dislike for him, the Irishman persistently forced himself on his notice. With this object he had thrown himself heart and soul into the Legitimist cause, as he would have thrown himself into the Independent Labour Party the day after if the leaders of that movement had been members of the peerage.