ndeed, he would have found himself the only
Benedict among this horde of wild bachelors. The informal circle was
of such recent association that, so far, no precedent for matrimony
had occurred, and it was more than doubtful how the experiment might
be received. In any case, he told himself, he could not be expected
to introduce people like Oswyn and McAllister to his wife--or,
rather, to Mrs. Sylvester's daughter. Oswyn was plainly impossible,
and McAllister's devotion to tobacco so inordinate that it had come
to be a matter of common belief that he smoked short pipes in his
sleep.

Then he had dismissed the subject; the long, pleasant holiday in
Switzerland intervened, and it was only on his return, late in the
autumn, that the question again presented itself, as he turned from
the threshold of the house in Park Street, where he had been dining,
and half unconsciously took the familiar short cut towards Turk
Street. He paused for a deliberate instant when he had hailed the
first passing hansom, and then told the man to drive to Piccadilly
Circus.

"I _must_ go there a few times more, if only to break it off gently,"
he reflected, "and I want to see old Rainham. It is stupid of me not
to have written to him--yes, stupid! Wonder if he has heard? I
mustn't give _him_ up, at any rate. We'll--we'll ask him to dinner,
and all that sort of thing. And what the deuce am I going to send to
the Academy? Thank goodness, I have enough Swiss sketches to work up
for the other galleries to last me for years. But the Academy----"

Then he lost himself in contemplative enjoyment of the familiar
vista of Regent Street, the curved, dotted lines of crocus-coloured
lamps, fading in the evening fog, the flitting, ruby-eyed cabs, and
the calm, white arc-lights, set irregularly about the circus,
dulling the grosser gas. He owned to himself that he had secretly
yearned for London; that his satisfaction on leaving the vast city
was never so great as his joy on again setting foot upon her
pavements.

The atmosphere of the long, low room, with its anomalous dark
ceiling and grotesquely-decorated walls, was heavily laden with the
incense of tobacco and a more subtile odour, which numbered among
its factors whisky and absinthe. The slippered, close-cropped
waiter, who, by popular report, could speak five languages, and
usually employed a mixture of two or three, was still clearing away
the debris of protracted dinners; and a few men sat about