There was a gravity that night about Lord Skene which was new in him. The sudden death of his old comrade, taken with the glass of joy at his lips, as it were, would seem to have had a curiously sobering effect on him. No doubt the mood was fleeting; but it had all the force of a reformation while it lasted. He questioned me more seriously than he had ever done yet as to my prospects and intentions; dwelling, even, upon the necessity of prayer as a medium for exhorting from the Deity the truth as to one’s vocation. Once or twice, as I noticed, he put out his hand to the decanter, and withdrew it empty. And presently he fell into a fit of musing, in which I did not venture to disturb him. Then suddenly he looked up. “I haven’t seen you since that night, Gaskett,” he said. “What a shocking experience! And to risk damnation with a joke on his lips! But that was Maurice all over. Do you remember how he greeted you, my boy? It ought to have warned us, perhaps, and----” I was smiling at him, as I leaned, playing with a knife, on the table. He broke off quickly, rose, not altogether steadily, to his feet, and stood staring at me. “By the Lord, Gaskett!” he said, “what was in your mother’s mind when she pupped you?” I was so taken aback that I could not utter a word in reply. And the next instant he had recovered himself, and was forcing an embarrassed laugh. “I think since that night my brain’s full of ghosts,” he said. “Come along now to the drawing-room.” CHAPTER XIII. JOHNNY DANDO As if Fate were moved to introduce some “comic relief” into a drama grown almost intolerably serious, there re-entered astonishingly upon the stage of my affairs at this pass my old chum and schoolfellow, Johnny Dando. I call him Johnny, and Johnny he was, and so would remain to the end of things. There are Jocks and Jacks and Jackos innumerable in the world. The Johnnies (not the inane breed) form a race apart, and are not to be confounded with any other. They are artless, beaming little men, who never, from cradle to grave, qualify in world-wisdom; but who, at sixty as at six, use the terms of childhood in their dealings with mankind. They are everywhere and at all times simple, modest, and impregnably loyal in their attachments.