Shelton shook his head, stammered out his sorrow, and was about to go.
The gentleman called Mabbey, plaintively feeling the places where his moustaches joined his pink and glossy cheeks, asked with an air of some surprise,
“What's your general game, then?”
“I really don't know,” said Shelton.
The gentleman called Mabbey chalked his cue, and, moving his round, knock-kneed legs in their tight trousers, took up his position for the stroke.
“What price that?” he said, as he regained the perpendicular; and his well-fed eyes followed Shelton with sleepy inquisition. “Curious dark horse, Shelton,” they seemed to say.
Shelton hurried out, and was about to run down the lower lawn, when he was accosted by another person walking in the sunshine—a slight-built man in a turned-down collar, with a thin and fair moustache, and a faint bluish tint on one side of his high forehead, caused by a network of thin veins. His face had something of the youthful, optimistic, stained-glass look peculiar to the refined English type. He walked elastically, yet with trim precision, as if he had a pleasant taste in furniture and churches, and held the Spectator in his hand.
“Ah, Shelton!” he said in high-tuned tones, halting his legs in such an easy attitude that it was impossible to interrupt it: “come to take the air?”
Shelton's own brown face, nondescript nose, and his amiable but dogged chin contrasted strangely with the clear-cut features of the stained-glass man.
“I hear from Halidome that you're going to stand for Parliament,” the latter said.