Hal was right in naming him Apollo. The Sun God might have been fashioned just so, when first he ravished the eyes of Venus. “And so the duchess took you into her boudoir?” she asked, with an unaccountable twinge of jealousy. “I do not know her. I’m afraid my friends are not so aristocratic as yours. But I believe she is considered very handsome.” “Hard,” he said, with an old-fashioned air. “Handsome enough, but very hard. I did not like her nearly so much as Lady Moir, her sister.” “Still no doubt she was very nice to you?” Lorraine rather hated herself for the question. The ways of aristocratic ladies, whose idle hours often supply a field of labour for the Evil One, were perfectly well known to her; and she wondered a little sharply how far he was still unspoilt. The majority of big, strong, full-blooded young men in his place would assuredly have sipped the cup of pleasure pretty deeply by now, even at his years, but with that fine, strong face, and the clear, frank eyes was he of these? She believed not, and was glad. He did not treat her question as if it implied any special favours, and merely replied jocularly: “Well, I suppose, since her blood is very blue and mine merely tinged, she was rather gracious, but of course the really ‘blue’ people generally are.” “Tell me who you happen to be?” Lorraine leant back against her cushions, with her slow, easy grace, asking the question with a lightness that robbed it of all pointedness or snobbery. He seemed amused, for he smiled as he answered frankly: “I happen to be Alymer Hadstock Hermon, one fo _the_ Hermons all right, but not the drawing-room end, so to speak; at the same time tinged with her family shadiness—‘blue’ of course I mean—though no doubt it applies in other ways as well. Does that satisfy your curiosity, or do you want to know more?” She loved looking at him, particularly with that humorous little smile on his lips, so she said: “Not half. I want to know all the rest.” “Very well. It’s quite an open book. I was born twenty-four years ago. I am an only child, and, as usual, the apple of my mother’s eye and the terror of my father’s pocket. He, my father, is not much else just now except a recluse. He was recently a member of parliament, a Liberal member, and, God knows, that’s little enough. I believe he even climbed in by a Chinese pigtail. “My grandfather was a Judge in the Divorce Court, which doesn’t somehow sound quite respectable, and my great-grandfather was a writer of law books, for which, personally, I think he ought to have been hanged. I can’t go any farther back; at any rate I don’t want to, because I’m certain it’s all so correct and dull there isn’t even a family skeleton.” “Is it the women or the men of the family that are beautiful?” “Oh, both,” with humorous eagerness. “Skeletons and ghosts we sought, and clamoured for, but ugliness, never.”