y assassinated on the other. G.J., mystified,
caught the grey eye of a youngish woman with a tired and fretful
expression.

"And you?" she inquired perfunctorily.

He demanded, with hesitation:

"Is this the Lechford Committee?"

"The what Committee?"

"The Lechford Committee headquarters." He thought she might be rather
an attractive little thing at, say, an evening party.

She gave him a sardonic look and answered, not rudely, but with large
tolerance:

"Can't you read?"

By means of gesture scarcely perceptible she directed his attention to
an immense linen sign stretched across the back of the big room, and
he saw that he was in the ant-heap of some Belgian Committee.

"So sorry to have troubled you!" he apologised. "I suppose you don't
happen to know where the Lechford Committee sits?"

"Never heard of it," said she with cheerful disdain. Then she smiled
and he smiled. "You know, the hotel simply hums with committees, but
this is the biggest by a long way. They can't let their rooms, so it
costs them nothing to lend them for patriotic purposes."

He liked the chit.

Presently, with a page-boy, he was ascending in a lift through
storey after storey of silent carpeted desert. Light alternated with
darkness, winking like a succession of days and nights as seen by
a god. The infant showed him into a private parlour furnished
and decorated in almost precisely the same taste as Christine's
sitting-room, where a number of men and women sat close together at a
long deal table, whose pale, classic simplicity clashed with the rest
of the apartment. A thin, dark, middle-aged man of austere visage
bowed to him from the head of the table. Somebody else indicated a
chair, which, with a hideous, noisy scraping over the bare floor,
he modestly insinuated between two occupied chairs. A third person
offered a typewritten sheet containing the agenda of the meeting. A
blonde girl was reading in earnest, timid tones the minutes of the
previous meeting. The affair had just begun. As soon as the minutes
had been passed the austere chairman turned and said evenly:

"I am sure I am expressing the feelings of the committee in welcoming
among us Mr. Hoape, who has so kindly consented to join us and give us
the benefit of his help and advice in our labours."

Sympathetic murmurs converged upon G.J. from the four sides of the
table, and G.J. nervously murmured a few incomprehensible words,
feeling both foolish and pleased. H