ur science degree?" said Tremayne. "It may be useful, but a divinity
degree would have been better."

"A divinity degree?"

Tremayne nodded.

"It is religion you want in Russia, and especially local religion.
You'll have to do a mighty lot of adapting when you're out there, Hay,
and I don't think you could do better than get acquainted with the local
saints. You'll find that the birth or death of four or five of them are
celebrated every week, and that your workmen will take a day's holiday
for each commemoration. If you're not pretty smart, they'll whip in a
few saints who have no existence, and you'll get no work done at
all--that will do."

He ended the interview with a jerk of his head, and as the young man got
to his feet to go, added: "Come back again to-morrow. I think you ought
to see Kensky."

"Who is he?" asked Hay courteously. "A local magnate?"

"In a sense he is and in a sense he's not," said the careful Mr.
Tremayne. "He's a big man locally, and from a business point of view, I
suppose he is a magnate. However, you'll be able to judge for yourself."

Malcolm Hay went out into the teeming streets of London, walking on air.
It was his first appointment--he was earning money, and it seemed
rather like a high-class dream.

In Maida Vale there are many little side streets, composed of shabby
houses covered with discoloured stucco, made all the more desolate and
gloomy in appearance by the long and narrow strip of "garden" which runs
out to the street. In one of these, devoted to the business of a
boarding-house, an old man sat at a portable bench, under the one
electric light which the economical landlady had allowed him. The room
was furnished in a typically boarding-house style.

But both the worker at the bench, and the woman who sat by the table,
her chin on her palms, watching him, seemed unaffected by the poverty of
their surroundings. The man was thin and bent of back. As he crouched
over the bench, working with the fine tools on what was evidently
intended to be the leather cover of a book, his face lay in the shadow,
and only the end of his straggling white beard betrayed his age.

Presently he looked up at the woman and revealed himself as a hawk-nosed
man of sixty. His face was emaciated and seamed, and his dark eyes shone
brightly. His companion was a woman of twenty-four, obviously of the
Jewish type, as was the old man; what good looks she possessed were
marred by the sneer on her lips