help smiling a slightly satirical
smile--"ought to be a lesson to Mrs. Archdale. It ought to show her that
after all she is perhaps making a great deal of fuss about nothing."

"Hardly that," said Coxeter with a frown.

They had now come to the corner of Queen Anne Street. He put out his
hand hesitatingly. The doctor took it, and, oddly enough, held it for a
moment while he spoke.

"Think over what I've said, Mr. Coxeter. It's a matter of hours. Mrs.
Archdale ought to be taken in hand at once." Then he went off, crossing
the street. "Pity the man's such a dry stick," he said to himself;
"now's his chance, if he only knew it!"

John Coxeter walked straight on. He had written the day before to say
that he would be at his office as usual this morning, but now the fact
quite slipped his mind.

Wild thoughts were surging through his brain; they were running away
with him and to such unexpected places!

The Monument? He had never thought of going up the Monument; he would
formerly have thought it a sad waste of time, but now the Monument
became to John Coxeter a place of pilgrimage, a spot of secret healing.
A man had once told him that the best way to see the City was at night,
but that if you were taking a lady you should choose a Sunday morning,
and go there on the top of a 'bus. He had thought the man who said this
very eccentric, but now he remembered the advice and thought it well
worth following.

By the time Coxeter turned into Cavendish Square he had travelled far
further than the Monument. He was in Richmond Park; Nan's hand was
thrust through his arm, as it had been while they had watched the first
boat fill slowly with the women and children.

* * * * *

To lovers who remember, the streets of a great town, far more than
country roads and lanes, hold over the long years precious, poignant
memories, for a background of stones and mortar has about it a character
of permanence which holds captive and echoes the scenes and words
enacted and uttered there.

Coxeter has not often occasion to go the little round he went that
morning, but when some accidental circumstance causes him to do so, he
finds himself again in the heart of that kingdom of romance from which
he was so long an alien, and of which he has now become a naturalized
subject. As most of us know, many ways lead to the kingdom of romance;
Coxeter found his way there by a water-way.

And so it is that when he reac