"It may seem presumptuous to speak after so short an acquaintance----"
"Not after your rescue last night. I had like to have died of embarrassment. I am not accustomed to have half a room gazing at me."
"You will," he said gallantly. "But it is kind of you to make it easier. This is it. I have been--am--very unhappy about a friend of mine here. Of course you know the work of one, who, many believe, is our greatest poet--Byam Warner?"
Anne drew her breath in and her eyelashes together. "I have read his poems," she said shortly.
"I see! Like many others you cannot dissociate the genius from the man. Because a fatal weakness----"
"What have I said, pray, that you should jump to such a conclusion?" She had recovered her breath but not her poise. "No one could admire him more than I. About his private life I know little and care less. He lives on this island, does he not?"
"We shall pass his house presently, but God knows if he is in it."
"He is a West Indian, is he not?"
"A scion of two of its foremost families, whose distinction by no means began with their emigration to the Antilles. One of his ancestors, Sir Thomas Warner, colonised most of these islands for the crown--in the seventeenth century. A descendant living on Trinidad, has in his possession the ring which Queen Elizabeth gave to Essex--you recall my friend's poem and the magnificent invective put into the frantic Queen's mouth at the bedside of Lady Nottingham? The ring was presented to Sir Thomas by Charles I., on the eve of his first expedition to these islands. The Byams are almost equally notable, descended as they are from the father of Anne Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire and Ormond." The spirit of British democracy still slept in the womb of the century, with board schools, the telegraph, and the penny press, and the aristocrat frankly admitted his pride of birth and demanded a corresponding distinction in his friends. "I hope I have not bored you," continued the young nobleman anxiously; "But I have given you some idea of Warner's pedigree that you may see for yourself that the theory of generations of gentle blood and breeding, combined with exceptional advantages, sometimes culminating in genius, finds its illustration in him. Also, alas! that such men are too often the prey of a highly wrought nervous system that coarser natures and duller brains are spared. When he was younger--I knew him at Cambridge--nor, indeed a few years since, he had not drained that system; his youthful vigour immediately rushing in to resupply exhausted conduits. But even earlier he was always disposed to drink more than was good for him, and when a wretched woman made ducks and drakes of his life some four or five years since, he became--well--I shall not go into details. This is his house. It has quite a history. Alexander Hamilton, an American statesman, was born in it. Have you ever heard of him?"