ep your keys, sir," said Anthony, "to let myself in."

With that he was gone.

Mrs. Slumper was in the midst of a very delicate operation, to wit, the
obliteration of her natural complexion--obsequies which not even her
maid was permitted to attend. Consequently she was anything but
pleased when her husband entered the room. Such procedure was out of
all order and convenience. That he came in suddenly and without first
knocking upon the door was insufferable. She turned herself round on
her seat, bristling....

There was no time for a scene, and, when Mrs. Slumper hurled herself
against Necessity, she fell back bruised and broken.

When she would have screamed, a hand was clapped over her mouth,
breaking her false teeth, and all her stifled shrieks, queries and
expostulations were literally cuffed into a whimper. Five minutes
later, toothless, half-dressed and trembling, she thrust a few things
into a dressing-case, struggled into a fur coat, and passed with
sagging knees downstairs, clinging to the arm of a bully whom she had
known as a worm.

Lyveden was waiting in the hall, beside him his case and hold-all--what
belongings he had thrust into them anyhow. He was intending to see the
couple into the cab and then go quietly away, for he was determined to
avoid the loathsome saturnalia with which his colleagues were certain
to signalize the _debacle_. When the two appeared, he started
involuntarily. He had been prepared for violence, he had expected
tears.... The vision of a blubbering idiot, that mowed and mumbled,
its wig awry, its dreadful face blotched, like a clown's, with paint,
swaddled from head to toe in gorgeous furs, leaning desperately upon
the very reed it had broken--this was unearthly, hellish. He found
himself praying that it might not visit him in his dreams....

It is to his credit that Anthony, having helped Mr. Slumper into his
hat and overcoat and Mr. and Mrs. Slumper into the taxi, flung his own
kit upon the canopy and accompanied the fugitives to Charing Cross.

The horror of that drive revisited him for months. The awful pregnant
silence, broken only by the sound of rapid irregular respiration, gave
to the cab the air of a death-chamber.

Arrived at the station, by his advice the two remained in the taxi
whilst he procured tickets which would take them to the coast by the
first available train. At the booking-office he learned, to his
inexpressible relief, that they had but te