of a charming voice, of quiet but unassailable manners.  Opinions differed as to his good looks.  Some women proclaimed him as adorable, rather Sphynx-like, you know, but quite fascinating with his well-marked eye-brows, his dark and curly lashes, the rich warm tints of his complexion, the unfathomable grey eyes and short upper lip with the down of adolescence upon it.  Other women without assigning any reason admitted he did not produce any effect on their sensibility—­they disliked law students, they said, even if they were of a literary turn; they also disliked curates and shopwalkers and sidesmen ... and Sunday-school teachers.  Give them manly men; avowed soldiers and sailors, riders to hounds, sportsmen, big game hunters, game-keepers, chauffeurs—­the chauffeur was becoming a new factor in Society, Bernard Shaw’s “superman”—­prize-fighters, meat-salesmen—­then you knew where you were.

Similarly men were divided in their judgment of him.  Some liked him very much, they couldn’t quite say why.  Others spoke of him contemptuously, like Major Armstrong had done.  This was due partly to certain women being inclined to run after him—­and therefore to jealousy on behalf of the professional lady-killer of the military species—­and partly to a vague feeling that he was enigmatic—­Sphynx-like, as some women said.  He was too silent sometimes, especially if the conversation amongst men tended towards racy stories; he was sarcastic and nimble-witted when he did speak.  And he was not easily bullied.  If he encountered an insolent person, he gave full effect to his five feet eight inches, the look from his grey eyes was unwavering as though he tacitly accepted the challenge, there was an invisible rapier hanging from his left hip, a poise of the body which expressed dauntless courage.

Honoria’s stories of his skill in fencing, riding, swimming, ball-games, helped him here.  They were perfectly true or sufficiently true—­mutatis mutandis—­and when put to the test stood the test.  David indeed found it well during this first season in Town to hire a hack and ride a little in the Park—­it only added one way and another about fifty pounds to his outlay and impressed certain of the Benchers who were beginning to turn an eye on him.  One elderly judge—­also a Park rider—­developed an almost inconvenient interest in him; asked him to dinner, introduced him to his daughters, and wanted to know a deal too much as to his position and prospects.

On the whole, it was a distinct relief from a public position, from this increasing number of town acquaintances, this broader and broader track strewn with cunning pitfalls, to lock up his rooms and go off to Wales for the Easter holidays.  Easter was late that year—­or it has to be for the purpose of my story—­and David was fortunate in the weather and the temperature.  If West Glamorganshire had looked richly, grandiosely beautiful in full summer, it had an exquisite, if quite different charm in early