interest. It was all
the same over again--the smiling throngs entering and leaving the
restaurants, the smug promenaders, the stream of gaily dressed women and
girls. Bond Street was even more crowded with shoppers and loiterers.
The shop windows were as full as ever, the toilettes of the women
as wonderful. Mankind, though khaki-clad, was plentiful. The narrow
thoroughfare was so crowded that his taxicab went only at a snail's
crawl, and occasionally he heard scraps of conversation. Two pretty
girls were talking to two young men in uniform.

"What a rag last night! I didn't get home till three!"

"Dick never got home at all. Still missing!"

"Evie and I are worn out with shopping. Everything's twice as expensive,
but one simply can't do without."

"I shouldn't do without anything, these days. One never knows how long
it may last."

The taxicab moved on, and the Bishop's eyes for a moment were
half-closed. The voices followed him, however. Two women, leading curled
and pampered toy dogs, were talking at the corner of the street.

"Sugar, my dear?" one was saying. "Why, I laid in nearly a
hundredweight, and I can always get what I want now. The shopkeepers
know that they have to have your custom after the war. It's only
the people who can't afford to buy much at a time who are really
inconvenienced."

"Of course, it's awfully sad about the war, and all that, but one has
to think of oneself. Harry told me last night that after paying all the
income tax he couldn't get out of, and excess profits; he is still--"

The voices dropped to a whisper. The Bishop thrust his head out of the
window.

"Drive me to Tothill Street, Westminster," he directed. "As quickly as
possible, please."

The man turned up a side street and drove off. Still the Bishop watched,
only by now the hopefulness had gone from his face. He had sought for
something of which there had been no sign.

He dismissed his taxicab in front of a large and newly finished block
of buildings in the vicinity of Westminster. A lift man conducted him
to the seventh floor, and a commissionaire ushered him into an already
crowded waiting room. A youth, however, who had noticed the Bishop's
entrance, took him in charge, and, conducting him through two other
crowded rooms, knocked reverently at the door of an apartment at the far
end of the suite. The door was opened, after a brief delay, by a
young man of unpleasant appearance, who gazed suspiciously at the
dis