Claud Fresnay, Viscount Harbinger was, at the age of thirty-one, perhaps the least encumbered peer in the United Kingdom.

Thanks to an ancestor who had acquired land, and departed this life one hundred and thirty years before the town of Nettlefold was built on a small portion of it, and to a father who had died in his son's infancy, after judiciously selling the said town, he possessed a very large income independently of his landed interests.

Tall and well-built, with handsome, strongly-marked features, he gave at first sight an impression of strength--which faded somewhat when he began to talk.

It was not so much the manner of his speech--with its rapid slang, and its way of turning everything to a jest--as the feeling it produced, that the brain behind it took naturally the path of least resistance.

He was in fact one of those personalities who are often enough prominent in politics and social life, by reason of their appearance, position, assurance, and of a certain energy, half genuine, and half mere inherent predilection for short cuts.