said firmly. "This clamour of London is
unbearable."

I opened the paper. Enormous headlines stared me in the face.

"Blue Disease sweeping over London. Ten thousand cases reported to-day.
Europe alarmed. Question of the isolation of Great Britain under
discussion. Debate in the Commons to-night. The Duke of Thud and the
Earl of Blunder victims. The Royal Family leave London."

We stood together on the pavement and gazed at these statements in
silence. A sense of wonder filled my mind. What a confusion! What an
emotional, feverish, heated confusion! Why could not they take the
matter calmly? What, in the name of goodness, was the reason of this
panic. They knew that the Blue Disease had caused no fatalities in
Birmingham, and yet so totally absent was the power of thought and
deduction, that they actually printed those glaring headlines.

"The fools," I said. "The amazing, fatuous fools. They simply want to
sell the paper. They have no other idea."

A strong nausea came over me. I crumpled up the paper and stood staring
up and down the street. The newspaper boy was in the far distance, still
shrieking. I saw Sir Barnaby Burtle, the obstetrician, standing by his
scarlet front door, eagerly devouring the news. His jaw was slack and
his eyes protruded.

The solemn houses of Harley Street only increased my nausea. The folly
of it--the selfish, savage folly of life!

"Come, Richard," said Alice. "The sooner we get to the house agent the
better. We could never live here."

"I'll put him on to the job of finding a bungalow on the South Coast at
once," I said. "And then we'll go and live there."

"We must get married," she observed.

"Married!" I stopped and stared at her with a puzzled expression. "Don't
you think the marriage ceremony is rather barbarous?"

She did not reply; we walked on immersed in our own thoughts. At times I
detected in the passers-by a gleam of sparrow-egg blue.

My house agent was a large, confused individual who habitually wore a
shining top hat on the back of his head and twisted a cigar in the
corner of his mouth. He was very fat, with one of those creased faces
that seem to fall into folds like a heavy crimson curtain. His brooding,
congested eye fell upon me as we entered, and an expression of alarm
became visible in its depths. He pushed his chair back and retreated to
a corner of the room.

"Dr. Harden!" he exclaimed fearfully, "you oughtn't to come here like
that, you really oug