The now reigning de Bohun, called Humphrey--after an illustrious ancestor, the Humphrey de Bohun who fought at Bannockburn under Edward II and undoubtedly held land, through his wife, in the neighbourhood of Boston--the son of this statesman, is the Mr. de Bohun--pronounced Deboon--of our own day: the highly respected Home Secretary who has already passed with such distinction through what he himself will call the _Cursus honorum_, having been Parliamentary Secretary to Harry Gates during all of the great Paramooka Scandal--when he was the Baby of the House--then successively rejected by Middleham West after the Seychelles Scandal--when Gates went to the Lords--elected after a second attempt by Middleham East, Under-Secretary during the period of the Second General Strike and at last, after the usual vicissitudes of public life, occupying the exalted position which he still adorns. His figure is familiar to the public, I fear, rather by early photographs than by recent portraits. He is a man tall and carefully clothed, with a rather weary expression, set on a long face, with insufficient grey hair neatly brushed. He is of a courteous demeanour. He is much attached to his country life at Paulings, so happily convenient to London, and sheltered from the large growth of suburban villas about it by a dense fringe of more or less ancient trees. He is a widower, possessed of three motor cars, but with only a flat in town. He has refused a baronetcy, for he has (alas!) no son, but one daughter, now just entering her nineteenth year. The name of the charming child is Marjorie, and it was but recently, upon her eighteenth birthday, the 15th of January, that her father somewhat solemnly presented her with the famous heirloom. He had used no little ceremonial, speaking a little pompously of her dead mother--a Ginningham--of the immemorial traditions of their house, and with curious insistence upon the supposed influence of the jewel upon their fortunes. He smiled somewhat lugubriously as he touched that point, but Marjorie, though not extravagantly intelligent, had brains enough to believe in omens, mascots, talismans, and was proud, as a girl should be at her age, to enter upon the possession of the Sacred Gem of the de Bohuns. Her father had discarded, for so great an occasion, the Victorian gold setting which, he was assured by Mr. Marolovitch and other experts, was in deplorable taste. The jewel was now set once more--by Mr. Marolovitch--as a brooch, since a woman was to wear it. The new setting was in platinum, designed in the finest taste of Berlin, with writhing curves and dead square divisions of the most entrancing variety. Large as the Emerald was, and its new Prussian setting adequately broad, yet the whole lay easily on the palm.