atives, not even a friend, to be worried about me. I
stood quite alone, and I half relished the idea of getting into a
mess--it would be part of life, too. I was going to have a little money,
and she excited my curiosity. I was tingling to know what she was really
at.

"And one might ask," I said, "what you are doing in this--in this...." I
was at a loss for a word to describe the room--the smugness parading as
professional Bohemianism.

"Oh, I am about my own business," she said, "I told you last night--have
you forgotten?"

"Last night you were to inherit the earth," I reminded her, "and one
doesn't start in a place like this. Now I should have gone--well--I
should have gone to some politician's house--a cabinet minister's--say
to Gurnard's. He's the coming man, isn't he?"

"Why, yes," she answered, "he's the coming man."

You will remember that, in those days, Gurnard was only the dark horse
of the ministry. I knew little enough of these things, despised politics
generally; they simply didn't interest me. Gurnard I disliked
platonically; perhaps because his face was a little enigmatic--a little
repulsive. The country, then, was in the position of having no
Opposition and a Cabinet with two distinct strains in it--the Churchill
and the Gurnard--and Gurnard was the dark horse.

"Oh, you should join your flats," I said, pleasantly. "If he's the
coming man, where do you come in?... Unless he, too, is a Dimensionist."

"Oh, both--both," she answered. I admired the tranquillity with which
she converted my points into her own. And I was very happy--it struck me
as a pleasant sort of fooling....

"I suppose you will let me know some day who you are?" I said.

"I have told you several times," she answered.

"Oh, you won't frighten me to-day," I asserted, "not here, you know, and
anyhow, why should you want to?"

"I have told you," she said again.

"You've told me you were my sister," I said; "but my sister died years
and years ago. Still, if it suits you, if you want to be somebody's
sister ..."

"It suits me," she answered--"I want to be placed, you see."

I knew that my name was good enough to place anyone. We had been the
Grangers of Etchingham since--oh, since the flood. And if the girl
wanted to be my sister and a Granger, why the devil shouldn't she, so
long as she would let me continue on this footing? I hadn't talked to a
woman--not to a well set-up one--for ages and ages. It was as if I had
come bac