r a week.'

I pulled myself up on the parapet of the bridge and filled my pipe. I
began to detect an ally.

'You're young to be an innkeeper,' I said.

'My father died a year ago and left me the business. I live there with
my grandmother. It's a slow job for a young man, and it wasn't my
choice of profession.'

'Which was?'

He actually blushed. 'I want to write books,' he said.

'And what better chance could you ask?' I cried. 'Man, I've often
thought that an innkeeper would make the best story-teller in the
world.'

'Not now,' he said eagerly. 'Maybe in the old days when you had
pilgrims and ballad-makers and highwaymen and mail-coaches on the road.
But not now. Nothing comes here but motor-cars full of fat women, who
stop for lunch, and a fisherman or two in the spring, and the shooting
tenants in August. There is not much material to be got out of that.
I want to see life, to travel the world, and write things like Kipling
and Conrad. But the most I've done yet is to get some verses printed
in CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL.' I looked at the inn standing golden in the
sunset against the brown hills.

'I've knocked a bit about the world, and I wouldn't despise such a
hermitage. D'you think that adventure is found only in the tropics or
among gentry in red shirts? Maybe you're rubbing shoulders with it at
this moment.'

'That's what Kipling says,' he said, his eyes brightening, and he
quoted some verse about 'Romance bringing up the 9.15'.

'Here's a true tale for you then,' I cried, 'and a month from now you
can make a novel out of it.'

Sitting on the bridge in the soft May gloaming I pitched him a lovely
yarn. It was true in essentials, too, though I altered the minor
details. I made out that I was a mining magnate from Kimberley, who
had had a lot of trouble with I.D.B. and had shown up a gang. They
had pursued me across the ocean, and had killed my best friend, and
were now on my tracks.

I told the story well, though I say it who shouldn't. I pictured a
flight across the Kalahari to German Africa, the crackling, parching
days, the wonderful blue-velvet nights. I described an attack on my
life on the voyage home, and I made a really horrid affair of the
Portland Place murder. 'You're looking for adventure,' I cried; 'well,
you've found it here. The devils are after me, and the police are
after them. It's a race that I mean to win.'

'By God!' he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply,