The garden was full of people—sirens in lace caps proffering useless articles of merchandise; officers from the Depot; boys and girls just home for the holidays; local dames talking scandal in deck-chairs. Upon the distant croquet lawn I beheld my hostess engaged in battle. I could hear her quite easily, shouting: "Now then—no treachery, no treachery!" to her partner, a nervous subaltern who was furtively offering advice to a pretty opponent. I remembered Bates’s hint, also a maxim to the effect that what is not missed is not mourned. Perhaps it would be wiser— "Yes, I would if I were you," remarked a raven’s voice at my elbow. "She hasn’t seen you yet!" Lord Eskerley is a very remarkable old gentleman, with certain pronounced and rather alarming characteristics. In the first place, he has an uncanny knack of reading one’s thoughts, which enables him to begin a conversation without wasting time over preliminaries, which he hates. Secondly, he has a peculiar habit of side-tracking a subject right in the middle of a sentence, sometimes because he is overtaken by a reverie, sometimes because another subject occurs to him—to return sooner or later, but always without warning, to the original topic—like brackets in algebra. I once met him coming out of Brooks’s Club, and accompanied him down St. James’s Street. "Just been to a funeral," he announced; and forthwith subsided into a brown study. I offered a few appropriate observations regarding the uncertainty of human life, and then proceeded to the political situation. He replied with his usual incisiveness. Ten minutes later, as we passed through the Horse Guards into Whitehall, he stopped abruptly, shook me by the hand, and said: "Good-bye! At Woking. We cremated him. Very interesting!"—and set off at a brisk walk in the direction of the Houses of Parliament. These conversational acrobatics call for considerable agility on the part of the listener. The strain is increased by the circumstance that, owing to his uncanny powers of memory, Lord Eskerley is able (and usually proceeds) to take up a conversation with you exactly where he left it off, sometimes after an interval of months. I was once walking in the Park on Sunday morning with Lady Christina, whom I had encountered for my sins after church. Near the Achilles statue I was aware of Lord Eskerley, plunged in profound meditation. Suddenly he looked up and saw me. He hurried forward and shook hands, utterly ignoring Lady Christina. "Courvoisier," he said, "not Martell!"—and departed towards Stanhope Gate. "What does the demented creature mean?" inquired Lady Christina.