ess became more real, and the worst of the vicissitudes seemed
suddenly over. A musical friend, gifted with mediocre but marketable
abilities, supplied Tony with a song, for which he obtained a trial
performance at an East End hall. Dressed as a jockey, for no particular
reason except that the costume suited him, he sang, "They quaff the gay
bubbly in Eccleston Square" to an appreciative audience, which included
the manager of a famous West End theatre of varieties. Tony and his song
won the managerial favour, and were immediately transplanted to the West
End house, where they scored a success of which the drooping music-hall
industry was at the moment badly in need.

It was just after the great catastrophe, and men of the London world were
in no humour to think; they had witnessed the inconceivable befall them,
they had nothing but political ruin to stare at, and they were anxious to
look the other way. The words of Tony's song were more or less
meaningless, though he sang them remarkably well, but the tune, with its
air of slyness and furtive joyousness, appealed in some unaccountable
manner to people who were furtively unhappy, and who were trying to
appear stoically cheerful.

"What must be, must be," and "It's a poor heart that never rejoices,"
were the popular expressions of the London public at that moment, and the
men who had to cater for that public were thankful when they were able to
stumble across anything that fitted in with the prevailing mood. For the
first time in his life Tony Luton discovered that agents and managers
were a leisured class, and that office boys had manners.

He entered Cicely's drawing-room with the air of one to whom assurance of
manner has become a sheathed weapon, a court accessory rather than a
trade implement. He was more quietly dressed than the usual run of music-
hall successes; he had looked critically at life from too many angles not
to know that though clothes cannot make a man they can certainly damn
him.

"Thank you, I have lunched already," he said in answer to a question from
Cicely. "Thank you," he said again in a cheerful affirmative, as the
question of hock in a tall ice-cold goblet was propounded to him.

"I've come to tell you the latest about the Gorla Mustelford evening," he
continued. "Old Laurent is putting his back into it, and it's really
going to be rather a big affair. She's going to out-Russian the
Russians. Of course, she hasn't their techniqu