telligent, rather grim cast of face, Radmore looked older than his age,
which was thirty-two. Yet, for all that, there was an air of power and of
reserved strength about him that set him apart from his fellows, and a
casual observer would have believed him cold, and perhaps a thought
calculating, in nature.

Yet, standing there, looking out on that quiet, narrow street, he was
seething with varying emotions in which he was, in a sense, luxuriating,
though whether he would have admitted any living being to a share in them
was another matter.

Home! Home at last for good!--after what had been, with two short breaks,
a nine years' absence from England, and from all that England stands for
to such a man.

He had left his country in 1910, an angry, embittered lad of
twenty-three, believing that he would never come back or, at any rate,
not till he was an old man having "made good."

But everything--everything had fallen out absolutely differently from
what he had expected it to do. The influence of Mars, so fatal to
millions of his fellow beings, had brought him marvellous, unmerited good
fortune. He had rushed home the moment War was declared, and after
putting in some time in a training which he hated to remember, he had at
last obtained a commission. Within a fortnight of having reached his
Mecca--the Front, he was back in England in the--to him--amazing guise of
wounded hero. But he had sent for none of his old friends for he was
still ashamed. After the Armistice he had rushed through England on his
way to Australia, putting in a few days with a Colonel and Mrs. Crofton,
with whom he had been thrown in Egypt. More to do his host a kindness
than for any other reason, Radmore had sent his godson, Timothy Tosswill,
a pedigree puppy, from the queer little Essex manor-house where the
Croftons were then making a rather futile attempt to increase their
slender means by breeding terriers.

The days had slipped by there very pleasantly, for Radmore liked his
taciturn host, and Mrs. Crofton was very pretty--an agreeable playfellow
for a rich and lonely man. So it was that when it came to the point he
had not cared to look up any of the people associated with his early
youth.

But now he was going to see them--almost had he forced himself upon them.
And the thought of going home to Old Place shook and stirred him to the
heart.

To-day he felt quite queerly at a loose end. This perhaps, partly because
the lately widowed Mr