know what the coming down feels like. And I, finding it not abhorrent
to a sophisticated and well-trained conscience, and thinking you could
well afford it, extracted a thousand pounds from your fortune. My dear
lad, if Phineas McPhail could return the money----"

Doggie broke in with a laugh. "Pray don't distress yourself, Phineas.
It's not a question of money. I've as much as ever I had. The last
thing in the world I've had to think of has been money."

"Then what in the holy names of Thunder and Beauty," cried Phineas,
throwing out one hand to an ancient saddle-bag sofa whose ends were
covered by flimsy rags, and the other to the decayed ormolu clock on
the mantelpiece, "what in the name of common sense are you doing in
this awful inelegant lodging-house?"

"I don't know," replied Doggie. "It's a fact," he continued after a
pause. "The scheme of decoration is revolting to every aesthetic sense
which I've spent my life in cultivating. Its futile pretentiousness is
the rasping irritation of every hour. Yet here I am. Quite
comfortable. And here I propose to stay."

Phineas McPhail, M.A., late of Glasgow and Cambridge, looked at Doggie
with his keen little grey eyes beneath bent and bristling eyebrows. In
the language of 33702 Private McPhail, he asked:

"What the blazes is it all about?"

"That's a long story," said Doggie, looking at his watch. "In the
meantime, I had better give some orders about dinner. And you would
like to wash."

He threw open a wing of the folding-doors, once in Georgian times
separating drawing-room from withdrawing-room, and now separating
living-room from bedroom, and switching on the light, invited McPhail
to follow.

"I think you'll find everything you want," said he.

Phineas McPhail, left alone to his ablutions, again looked round, and
he had more reason than ever to ask what it was all about. Marmaduke's
bedroom at Denby Hall had been a dream of satinwood and dull blue
silk. The furniture and hangings had been Mrs. Trevor's present to
Marmaduke on his sixteenth birthday. He remembered how he had been
bored to death by that stupendous ass of an old woman--for so he had
characterized her--during the process of selection and installation.
The present room, although far more luxurious than any that Phineas
McPhail had slept in for years, formed a striking contrast with that
remembered nest of effeminacy.

"I'll have to give it up," he said to himself. But just as he had put
the