bore a solid
brass plate with his name. He thought, as he opened the door with his Yale
key, how strange it was that this, the very house he had planned to live
in with Mildred, and had leased, and beautified, and decorated for her,
should have been offered for his inspection by the first West End
house-agent he applied to upon returning to London, whose dust he had
shaken off the soles of his feet forever, barely six years before.

The practitioner who occupied the house--not the same man who had taken
over the lease and fittings from Saxham--was ready to give it up, with all
its costly appurtenances and up-to-date appointments, together with the
practice, for quite a moderate slice of that legacy of thousands that had
come to Saxham from Mildred's dead boy. Saxham, diagnosing the man's fever
to realise and depart, wondered what secret, desperate motive lay at the
back of his hurry? The reason was soon evident. Like thousands of other
men, professional and private, the physician had been a dabbler on the
Stock Exchange, and had gone in heavily for South African mining-stock,
and had been ruined by the War.

It was a year of ruin. Society, led by Messrs. Washington P. Jukes and
Themistocles K. Mombasa, six-foot, full-blooded buck niggers, elegantly
scented, white-gloved, and arrayed in evening garments of Bond Street cut,
danced the newly-imported Cake Walk through its ball-rooms and
reception-saloons, with laughter on its reddened lips, and paste
imitations of its family jewels in its waved coiffure and on its powdered
bosom, and Ruin in its heart.

Great manufacturing enterprises, paralysed by lack of funds and lack of
hands, were ruined. Managers producing plays to empty houses were ruined.
Publishers publishing books that nobody cared any longer to buy, were
ruined. Painters expending time, and money, and toil, upon pictures that
no longer found purchasers were ruined. Millions of smaller folks were
ruined by the ruin of their betters. Only the great Mourning Warehouses
prospered exceedingly, like the Liquor Trade and the Drug Trade. And the
Remount and Forage Trades, and the Army-Contractors, flourished as the
green bay-tree.

Saxham's motor-brougham had gone on in advance, twisting knowingly in and
out of various corkscrew thoroughfares. It was waiting outside the house
in Lower Harley Street as the Doctor reached the door. The chauffeur, a
spare, short young man, punctiliously buttoned up in a long dark