between his paws, he kissed it. Tommy always
remembered the smoky flavour of the bristly grey moustache.

"One thing more," said the Prince sternly--"not a word of all this. Don't
open your mouth to speak of it till you are back in Gough Square."

"Do you take me for a mug?" answered Tommy.

They behaved very oddly to Tommy after the Prince had disappeared.
Everybody took a deal of trouble for her, but none of them seemed to know
why they were doing it. They looked at her and went away, and came again
and looked at her. And the more they thought about it, the more puzzled
they became. Some of them asked her questions, but what Tommy really
didn't know, added to what she didn't mean to tell, was so prodigious
that Curiosity itself paled at contemplation of it.

They washed and brushed her up and gave her an excellent supper; and
putting her into a first-class compartment labelled "Reserved," sent her
back to Waterloo, and thence in a cab to Gough Square, where she arrived
about midnight, suffering from a sense of self-importance, traces of
which to this day are still discernible.

Such and thus was the beginning of all things. Tommy, having talked for
half an hour at the rate of two hundred words a minute, had suddenly
dropped her head upon the table, had been aroused with difficulty and
persuaded to go to bed. Peter, in the deep easy-chair before the fire,
sat long into the night. Elizabeth, liking quiet company, purred softly.
Out of the shadows crept to Peter Hope an old forgotten dream--the dream
of a wonderful new Journal, price one penny weekly, of which the Editor
should come to be one Thomas Hope, son of Peter Hope, its honoured
Founder and Originator: a powerful Journal that should supply a long-felt
want, popular, but at the same time elevating--a pleasure to the public,
a profit to its owners. "Do you not remember me?" whispered the Dream.
"We had long talks together. The morning and the noonday pass. The
evening still is ours. The twilight also brings its promise."

Elizabeth stopped purring and looked up surprised. Peter was laughing to
himself.

STORY THE SECOND--William Clodd appoints himself Managing Director

Mrs. Postwhistle sat on a Windsor-chair in the centre of Rolls Court.
Mrs. Postwhistle, who, in the days of her Hebehood, had been likened by
admiring frequenters of the old Mitre in Chancery Lane to the ladies,
somewhat emaciated, that an English artist, since become fa