etually leaving bouquets for Mrs Boulnois; carriages and
motor-cars were perpetually calling at the cottage for Mrs Boulnois;
balls and masquerades perpetually filled the grounds in which the
baronet paraded Mrs Boulnois, like the Queen of Love and Beauty at a
tournament. That very evening, marked by Mr Kidd for the exposition of
Catastrophism, had been marked by Sir Claude Champion for an open-air
rendering of Romeo and Juliet, in which he was to play Romeo to a Juliet
it was needless to name.

"I don't think it can go on without a smash," said the young man
with red hair, getting up and shaking himself. "Old Boulnois may be
squared--or he may be square. But if he's square he's thick--what you
might call cubic. But I don't believe it's possible."

"He is a man of grand intellectual powers," said Calhoun Kidd in a deep
voice.

"Yes," answered Dalroy; "but even a man of grand intellectual powers
can't be such a blighted fool as all that. Must you be going on? I shall
be following myself in a minute or two."

But Calhoun Kidd, having finished a milk and soda, betook himself
smartly up the road towards the Grey Cottage, leaving his cynical
informant to his whisky and tobacco. The last of the daylight had faded;
the skies were of a dark, green-grey, like slate, studded here and there
with a star, but lighter on the left side of the sky, with the promise
of a rising moon.

The Grey Cottage, which stood entrenched, as it were, in a square of
stiff, high thorn-hedges, was so close under the pines and palisades of
the Park that Kidd at first mistook it for the Park Lodge. Finding the
name on the narrow wooden gate, however, and seeing by his watch that
the hour of the "Thinker's" appointment had just struck, he went in and
knocked at the front door. Inside the garden hedge, he could see that
the house, though unpretentious enough, was larger and more luxurious
than it looked at first, and was quite a different kind of place from a
porter's lodge. A dog-kennel and a beehive stood outside, like symbols
of old English country-life; the moon was rising behind a plantation
of prosperous pear trees, the dog that came out of the kennel was
reverend-looking and reluctant to bark; and the plain, elderly
man-servant who opened the door was brief but dignified.

"Mr Boulnois asked me to offer his apologies, sir," he said, "but he has
been obliged to go out suddenly."

"But see here, I had an appointment," said the interviewer, wit