ng absence, that every step was pleasure. At the top
of Grosvenor Place he stood still awhile only to snuff up the soft,
rainy air, or to delight his eye now with the shining pools which some
showers of the afternoon had left behind them on the pavement, and now
with the light veil of fog which closed in the distance of Piccadilly.

"And there are silly persons who grumble about the fogs!" he thought,
contemptuously, while he was thus yielding himself heart and sense to
his beloved London.

As for him, dried and wilted by long years of cloudless heat, he drank
up the moisture and the mist with a kind of physical passion--the noises
and the lights no less. And when he had resumed his walk along the
crowded street, the question buzzed within him, whether he must indeed
go back to his exile, either at Teheran, or nearer home, in some more
exalted post? "I've got plenty of money; why the deuce don't I give it
up, and come home and enjoy myself? Only a few more years, after all;
why not spend them here, in one's own world, among one's own kind?"

It was the weariness of the governing Englishman, and it was answered
immediately by that other instinct, partly physical, partly moral, which
keeps the elderly man of affairs to his task. Idleness? No! That way
lies the end. To slacken the rush of life, for men of his sort, is to
call on death--death, the secret pursuer, who is not far from each one
of us. No, no! Fight on! It was only the long drudgery behind, under
alien suns, together with the iron certainty of fresh drudgery ahead,
that gave value, after all, to this rainy, this enchanting
Piccadilly--that kept the string of feeling taut and all its
notes clear.

"Going to bed, Sir Wilfrid?" said a voice behind him, as he turned down
St. James's Street.

"Delafield!" The old man faced round with alacrity. "Where have you
sprung from?"

Delafield explained that he had been dining with the Crowboroughs, and
was now going to his club to look for news of a friend's success or
failure in a north-country election.

"Oh, that'll keep!" said Sir Wilfrid. "Turn in with me for half an hour.
I'm at my old rooms, you know, in Duke Street."

"All right," said the young man, after what seemed to Sir Wilfrid a
moment of hesitation.

"Are you often up in town this way?" asked Bury, as they walked on.
"Land agency seems to be a profession with mitigations."

"There is some London business thrown in. We have some large milk depots
i