“Yes, the devil and hell certainly had a lot to do with it, Ralph. There was hell in that poor boy’s eyes when he saw Miss Brown and said, ‘My God!’ You see, he loved that girl quite frantically and seriously, and she came to stay with him and his people in Hampshire so that the engagement could be confirmed and all that, and early one morning he saw her coming out of Basil’s room. A hungry girl. After that he went away without a word, to give poor Basil his chance--you remember, we guessed that poor Basil was in love at last, the queer, furtive way he came by of breaking dinner-engagements?--and then the next thing he heard was that the girl had broken the engagement and that Basil had put a bullet into his silly sweet head.... “Perhaps,” said Ralph Trevor, “she couldn’t help it. Life is very hard for very pretty girls, Raymond. Perhaps she just couldn’t help it....” But I said nothing, what was the use? I had seen that white look she gave that wretched boy, and that white look was like a disease in the sunlight. Lithe limbs and curling lips, laughing eyes and loose heart--a hungry girl, made to rot men. X: THE IRREPROACHABLE CONDUCT OF A GENTLEMAN WHO ONCE REFUSED A KNIGHTHOOD I Said Mr. Fall to Lord Tarlyon on the telephone, one day in July: “Pleased if you’d dine with me to-night.” “Sorry,” said Lord Tarlyon; and he was sorry, for he liked Mr. Fall very well. “Promised to dine with a man.” “Pleased if you’d bring him along,” said Mr. Fall. Mr. Fall lived in Lord Brazie’s house in Grosvenor Square. (Lord Brazie, of course, lived somewhere else, but he wouldn’t have been able to live at all if Mr. Fall had not taken his house.) As George Tarlyon and I walked thither through the quietening streets and the dainty noises of the Town in the evening, we spoke of Cyrus Fall; and then a silence fell upon us, for we were meditating on millionaires of the Canadian sort. In the last decade of the last century millionaires were always American: in the first decade of this century an Australian mode set in, and many a young lady of birth was married to a fruit-farm, and many a chorus-girl decorated the bush: but fashion, as _The Tatler_ has brilliantly put it, is proverbially fickle, and with the war all millionaires who were not Canadian fell into great discredit, so that many women exchanged theirs for the Canadian model on the first opportunity. Now of these, the greatest was Cyrus Fall....