The Yellow Streak | Page 5

match. His
stumpy legs looked ridiculous in his baggy golf knickers of rough
tweed, which he wore with gaiters extending half-way up his short,
stout calves. As he came in, he slung off the heavy tweed
shooting-cloak he had been wearing and placed it with his Homburg
hat on a chair.

This was Dr. Romain, whose name thus written seems indecently naked
without the string of complementary initials indicative of the honours
and degrees which years of bacteriological research had heaped upon
him. His companion was a tall, slim, fair-haired young man, about as
good a specimen of the young Englishman turned out by the English
public school as one could find. He was extremely good-looking with a
proud eye and finely chiselled features, but the suggestion of youth in
his face and figure was countered by a certain poise, a kind of latent
seriousness which contrasted strangely with the general cheery
insouciance of his type.
A soldier would have spotted the symptoms at once, "Five years of
war!" would have been his verdict--that long and strange entry into life
of so many thousands of England's manhood which impressed the
stamp of premature seriousness on all those who came through. And
Captain Sir Horace Trevert, Bart., D.S.O., had gone from his famous
school straight into a famous regiment, had won his decoration before
he was twenty-one, and been twice wounded into the bargain.
"Where's everybody?" queried the doctor, rubbing his hands at the
blazing log-fire.
"Robin and Mary went off to play billiards," said the young man, "and I
left old Parrish after lunch settling down for an afternoon's work in the
library ..."
He crossed the room to the fire and stood with his back to the flame.
"What a worker that man is!" ejaculated the doctor. "He had one of his
secretaries down this morning with a car full of portfolios, blue-prints,
specifications, and God knows what else. Parrish polished the whole lot
off and packed the fellow back to London before mid-day. Some of
Hornaway's people who were waiting went in next, and he was through
with them by lunch-time!"
Trevert wagged his head in admiration.
"And he told me he wanted to have a quiet week-end!" he said. "That's

why he has no secretary living in the house."
"A quiet week-end!" repeated Romain drily. "Ye gods!"
"He's a marvel for work," said the young man.
"He certainly is," replied the doctor. "He's done wonders with
Hornaway's. When he took the place over at the beginning of the war,
they were telling me, it was a little potty concern making toy air guns
or lead soldiers or something of the sort. And they never stop coining
money now, it seems. Parrish must be worth millions ..."
"Lucky devil!" said Trevert genially.
"Ah!" observed the doctor sententiously, "but he's had to work for it,
mark you! He's had the most extraordinary life, they tell me. He was at
one period of his career a bartender on the Rand, a man was saying at
the club the other day. But most of his life he's lived in Canada, I gather.
He was telling us the other evening, before you and Mary came down,
that he was once a brakeman on the Canadian Pacific Railway. He said
he invested all his savings in books on engineering and read them in his
brakeman's van on his trips across the Dominion. Ah! he's a fine
fellow!"
He lowered his voice discreetly.
"And a devilish good match, eh, Horace?"
The young man flushed slightly.
"Yes," he said unwillingly.
"A dam' good match for somebody," urged the doctor with a malicious
twinkle in his eye.
"Here, Doc," said Horace, suddenly turning on him, "you stick to your
bugs and germs. What do you know about matchmaking, anyway?"
Dr. Romain chuckled.

"We bacteriologists are trained observers. One learns a lot watching the
life and habits of the bacillus, Horace, my boy. And between ourselves,
Parrish would be a lucky fellow if ..."
Trevert turned to him. His face was quite serious, and there was a little
touch of hauteur in his voice. He was the 17th Baronet.
"My dear Doc," he said, "aren't you going a bit fast? Parrish is a very
good chap, but one knows nothing about him ..."
Sagely the doctor nodded his grizzled head.
"That's true," he agreed. "He appears to have no relatives and nobody
over here seems to have heard of him before the war. A man was
saying at the Athenaeum the other day ..."
Trevert touched his elbow. Bude had appeared, portly, imperturbable,
bearing a silver tray set out with the appliances for tea.
"Bude," cried Trevert, "don't tell me there are no tea-cakes again!"
"On the contrairey, sir," answered the butler in the richly sonorous
voice pitched a little