ed cheek.

"Put that box back, you cuckoo!" George exploded chokingly.

Then the door opened and Mr. Enwright appeared. Simultaneously some
shillings slipped out of George's pocket and rolled about the floor. The
hour was Mr. Enwright's customary hour of arrival, but he had no fair
excuse for passing through that room instead of proceeding along the
corridor direct to the principals' room. His aspect, as he gazed at
George's hair and at the revealed sateen back of George's waistcoat, was
unusual. Mr. Enwright commonly entered the office full of an intense and
aggrieved consciousness of his own existence--of his insomnia, of the
reaction upon himself of some client's stupidity, of the necessity of
going out again in order to have his chin lacerated by his favourite and
hated Albanian barber. But now he had actually forgotten himself.

"What _is_ this?" he demanded.

Lucas having quickly restored the box, George subsided dangerously
thereon, and arose in a condition much disarrayed and confused, and
beheld Mr. Enwright with shame.

"I--I was just looking to see if the trap of the chimney was shut," said
George. It was foolish in the extreme, but it was the best he could do,
and after all it was a rather marvellous invention. Lucas sat down and
made no remark.

"You might respect the mantelpiece," said Mr. Enwright bitterly, and
went into the principals' room, where John Orgreave could be heard
dictating letters. George straightened his clothes and picked up his
money, and the two men of the world giggled nervously at each other.

Mr. Haim next disturbed them. The shabby, respectable old man smiled
vaguely, with averted glance.

"I think he's heard the result," said he.

Both men knew that 'he' was Mr. Enwright, and that the 'result' was the
result of the open competition for the L150,000 Law Courts which a proud
provincial city proposed to erect for itself. The whole office had
worked very hard on the drawings for that competition throughout the
summer, while cursing the corporation which had chosen so unusual a date
for sending-in day. Even Lucas had worked. George's ideas for certain
details, upon which he had been engaged on the evening of his
introduction to Mr. Haim's household, had been accepted by Mr. Enwright.
As for Mr. Enwright, though the exigencies of his beard, and his regular
morning habit of inveighing against the profession at great length, and
his inability to decide where he should lunch, gener