d for the time being.

The fact that such a paper existed was brought home to him with the
coffee. A note was placed upon his table by the attentive waiter.

"What's this?" he asked.

"The lady, sare," said the waiter vaguely.

Roland looked round the room excitedly. The spirit of romance gripped
him. There were many ladies present, for this particular restaurant
was a favorite with artistes who were permitted to "look in" at their
theaters as late as eight-thirty. None of them looked particularly
self-conscious, yet one of them had sent him this quite unsolicited
tribute. He tore open the envelope.

The message, written in a flowing feminine hand, was brief, and Mrs.
Grundy herself could have taken no exception to it.

"'Squibs,' one penny weekly, buy it," it ran. All the mellowing effects
of a good dinner passed away from Roland. He was feverishly irritated.
He paid his bill and left the place.

A visit to a neighboring music-hall occurred to him as a suitable
sedative. Hardly had his nerves ceased to quiver sufficiently to allow
him to begin to enjoy the performance, when, in the interval between two
of the turns, a man rose in one of the side boxes.

"Is there a doctor in the house?"

There was a hush in the audience. All eyes were directed toward the box.
A man in the stalls rose, blushing, and cleared his throat.

"My wife has fainted," continued the speaker. "She has just discovered
that she has lost her copy of 'Squibs.'"

The audience received the statement with the bovine stolidity of an
English audience in the presence of the unusual.

Not so Roland. Even as the purposeful-looking chuckers-out wended their
leopard-like steps toward the box, he was rushing out into the street.

As he stood cooling his indignation in the pleasant breeze which had
sprung up, he was aware of a dense crowd proceeding toward him. It was
headed by an individual who shone out against the drab background like a
good deed in a naughty world. Nature hath framed strange fellows in her
time, and this was one of the strangest that Roland's bulging eyes had
ever rested upon. He was a large, stout man, comfortably clad in a suit
of white linen, relieved by a scarlet 'Squibs' across the bosom. His
top-hat, at least four sizes larger than any top-hat worn out of a
pantomime, flaunted the same word in letters of flame. His umbrella,
which, tho the weather was fine, he carried open above his head, bore
the device "One penny weekly