ls and streams, ferny
hollows, groups of birches, knolls surmounted with pines, meadows of
lush, emerald-green grass, full-foliaged elms, twisted oaks,
orchards hung with reddening apples, red winding lanes between
unchecked hedges, blue mountains in the far distance, and the
glimpse of a river or of ponds large enough to be called a mere or
even a lake. The exhausted London to which David Williams had
returned a few days previously had lost a few thousands of its
West-end and City population--just, in fact, most of its interesting
if unlikable folk, its people who mattered, its insolent spoilt
darlings whom you liked to recognize in the Carlton atrium, in Hyde
Park, in a box at the theatre: yet the frowsy, worthy millions were
there all the same. The air of its then smelly streets was used up
and had the ammoniac strench of the stable. It was a weary London.
The London actors had not returned from Cornwall and Switzerland.
Provincial companies enjoyed--a little anxiously owing to uncertain
receipts at the box office--a brief license on the boards of famous
play-houses. The newspapers had exhausted the stunt of the silly
season and were at their flattest and most yawn-provoking. The South
African War had reached its dreariest stage....

Bertie Adams on this close September evening had out-stayed the
other employes of _Fraser and Warren_ in their fifth floor office at
No. 88-90 Chancery Lane. He had remained after office hours to do a
little work, a little "self-improvement"; and he was just about to
close the outer office and leave the key with the housekeeper, when
the lift came surging up and out of it stepped a young man in a
summer suit and a bowler hat who, to Bertie's astonishment, not only
dashed straight at the door of the partners' room, but opened its
Yale lock with a latch-key as though long accustomed to do so. "But,
sir!..." exclaimed the junior clerk (his promotion to that rank had
tacitly dated from Vivie Warren's departure). "It's all right," said
the stranger. "I'm Mr. David Williams and I've come to draw up some
notes for Mrs. Claridge. I dare say Miss Fraser has told you I
should work in the office every now and then whilst my cousin--Miss
Warren, you know--is away. You needn't wait, though you can close
the outer office before you go; and, by the bye, you might fetch me
_Who's Who_ for the present year." All this was said a little
breathlessly.

Bertie brought the volume, then only half the size o