The visitors in Francis Markrute's library nearly always faced the light, while he himself had his back to it.
There was no doubt about this visitor's nation! He was flamboyantly English.

If you had wished to send a prize specimen of the race to a World's Fair you could not have selected anything finer.

He was perhaps more Norman than Saxon, for his hair was dark though his eyes were blue, and the marks of breeding in the creature showed as plainly as in a Derby winner.

Francis Markrute always smoked his cigars to the end, if he were at leisure and the weed happened to be a good one, but Lord Tancred (Tristram Lorrimer Guiscard Guiscard, 24th Baron Tancred, of Wrayth in the County of Suffolk) flung his into the grate after a few whiffs, and he laughed with a slightly whimsical bitterness as he went on with the conversation.
"Yes, Francis, my friend, the game here is played out; I am thirty, and there is nothing interesting left for me to do but emigrate to Canada, for a while at least, and take up a ranch." "Wrayth mortgaged heavily, I suppose ?" said Mr.Markrute, quietly.
"Pretty well, and the Northern property, too.

When my mother's jointure is paid there is not a great deal left this year, it seems.