ly more
than a schoolboy, he had first come to the boarding-house. Long
since the pulverizing rationalism of his friend Dr. Warner had
crushed such youthful ignorances and disproportionate dreams.
Under the Warnerian scepticism and science of hopeless
human types, Inglewood had long come to regard himself as
a timid, insufficient, and "weak" type, who would never marry;
to regard Diana Duke as a materialistic maidservant;
and to regard his first fancy for her as the small,
dull farce of a collegian kissing his landlady's daughter.
And yet the phrase about military music moved him queerly,
as if he had heard those distant drums.

"She has to keep things pretty tight, as is only natural," said Moon,
glancing round the rather dwarfish room, with its wedge of slanted ceiling,
like the conical hood of a dwarf.

"Rather a small box for you, sir," said the waggish Mr. Gould.

"Splendid room, though," answered Mr. Smith enthusiastically, with his
head inside his Gladstone bag. "I love these pointed sorts of rooms,
like Gothic. By the way," he cried out, pointing in quite a startling way,
"where does that door lead to?"

"To certain death, I should say," answered Michael Moon, staring up at
a dust-stained and disused trapdoor in the sloping roof of the attic.
"I don't think there's a loft there; and I don't know what else it
could lead to." Long before he had finished his sentence the man
with the strong green legs had leapt at the door in the ceiling,
swung himself somehow on to the ledge beneath it, wrenched it open after
a struggle, and clambered through it. For a moment they saw the two
symbolic legs standing like a truncated statue; then they vanished.
Through the hole thus burst in the roof appeared the empty and lucid
sky of evening, with one great many-coloured cloud sailing across
it like a whole county upside down.

"Hullo, you fellows!" came the far cry of Innocent Smith,
apparently from some remote pinnacle. "Come up here;
and bring some of my things to eat and drink. It's just the spot
for a picnic."

With a sudden impulse Michael snatched two of the small
bottles of wine, one in each solid fist; and Arthur Inglewood,
as if mesmerized, groped for a biscuit tin and a big jar of ginger.
The enormous hand of Innocent Smith appearing through the aperture,
like a giant's in a fairy tale, received these tributes and bore them
off to the eyrie; then they both hoisted themselves out of the window.
They were