His Hour

Jack Courtray was a thoroughly good all-around sportsman, and had an

immense success with women as a rule. His methods were primitive and

direct. When not hunting or shooting, he went straight to the point

with a beautiful simplicity unhampered by sentiment, and then when

wearied with one woman, moved on to the next.

He was a tremendously good fellow every man said. Just a natural animal

creature, whom grooming and polishing in the family for some hundred or

so of years had made into a gentleman.

He was as ignorant as he could well be. To him the geography of the

world meant different places for sport. India represented tigers and

elephants. It had no towns or histories that mattered, it had jungles

and forests. Africa said lions. Austria, chamois--and Russia, bears!

Women were either sisters, or old friends and jolly comrades--like

Tamara. Or they came under the category of sport. A lesser sport, to be

indulged in when the rarer beasts were not obtainable for his gun--but

still sport!

He found himself in a delightful milieu. The prospect of certain bears

in the near future--a dear old friend to frolic with in the immediate

present, and the problematic joys of a possible affair to be indulged

in meanwhile. No wonder he was in the best of spirits, and when Tamara,

without arrière pensée, took the empty place at his side, he

bent over her and filled her plate with the thinnest ham he had been

able to cut, with all the apparent air of a devoted lover. And if she

had looked up she would have seen that the Prince suddenly had begun to

watch her with a fierceness in his eyes.

"This is a jolly place," Jack Courtray said. He had just the faintest

lisp, which sounded rather attractive, and Tamara, after the storms and

emotions of the past few days, found a distinct pleasure and rest in

his obviousness.

It is an ill wind which blows no one any good, for presently the Prince

turned and devoted himself to Tatiane Shébanoff.

She was quite the prettiest of all this little clique, petite and fair

and sweet. Divorced from a brute of a husband a year or so ago, and now

married to an elderly Prince.

And she loved Gritzko with passion, and while she was silent about it,

her many friends told him so.

For his part he remained unconcerned, and sometimes troubled himself

about her, and sometimes not.

And so the evening wore on, and apparently it had no distinct sign that

it was to be one of the finger-posts of fate.