xquisite still. The
solitary observer sits and listens to it, the sole representative from
the outer world. All this gorgeous pageantry is for him alone; all this
wealth of emotion, this story of love and murder, this work of the great
poet now passed away--all this is poured into the ears of one man, who
sits motionless, entranced, until the tale is told, the play done, and
he walks out into the quiet night, quivering with the terrible pathos of
_Becket's_ end.

[Illustration: "SOMEONE TOUCHED ME ON THE ARM."]

_A Blessing Disguised_.

BY F. W. ROBINSON.

ILLUSTRATED BY A. BIRKENRAUTH AND ST. M. FITZGERALD.

-----

When I came home from my fortnight's holiday, amongst Tom Brisket's
cows, in Huntingdonshire--once a year, for just fourteen days, do I
unbend from the cares of business and seek relaxation far away from
Bermondsey--and let myself in, with my patent latchkey, and walked with
my usual confidence into my front parlour, you might have knocked me
down with a feather. Any feather would have done it--a butterfly's,
say--I was thrown so completely off my guard. I had been so confident. I
was not in any way prepared for it.

[Illustration: "MY HOUSEKEEPER."]

The house was desolate enough, but that was not it. Mrs. Kibbey had
failed to put in an appearance at the end of her holiday, although I had
wired to her only yesterday that I should be home at precisely 8.15
p.m.; but it was not the unlooked for absence of Mrs. Kibbey--my
housekeeper--that upset me thoroughly, oh, no. The gas was not lighted,
and the supper was not likely to come off in the absence of Kibbey,
certainly, but these were only minor features of a colossal
surprise--bagatelles, or anything you may like to call them. Golden
Birch Villa, Streatham, S.E., was simply chaos--that is the mildest
and easiest way of explaining the matter to begin with. One word
suffices--Chaos. It will take a great many words to explain why my
little suburban retreat, on which I had prided myself for so many years
of my bachelor life, was a mass of conglomerated wreckage. I will be as
brief as I can. I am not a prolix man; I know the value of time, and of
other people's time. I should not have had a flourishing business in
Bermondsey, if I didn't know. Golden Birch Villa, Streatham, then, had
been _burgled_. Broken into, despoiled and defaced, was my little
country retreat from the turmoil of town, and it was this which had
confronted me after