in agreement."

"Hook entirely supports the Prime Minister," assented Harker.

"Or the Prime Minister entirely supports Hook," said Horne Fisher,
and began idly to knock the balls about on the billiard table.

Horne Fisher came down next morning in a late and leisurely fashion,
as was his reprehensible habit; he had evidently no appetite for
catching worms. But the other guests seemed to have felt a similar
indifference, and they helped themselves to breakfast from the
sideboard at intervals during the hours verging upon lunch. So that
it was not many hours later when the first sensation of that strange
day came upon them. It came in the form of a young man with light
hair and a candid expression, who came sculling down the river and
disembarked at the landing stage. It was, in fact, no other than Mr.
Harold March, whose journey had begun far away up the river in the
earliest hours of that day. He arrived late in the afternoon, having
stopped for tea in a large riverside town, and he had a pink evening
paper sticking out of his pocket. He fell on the riverside garden
like a quiet and well-behaved thunderbolt, but he was a thunderbolt
without knowing it.

The first exchange of salutations and introductions was commonplace
enough, and consisted, indeed, of the inevitable repetition of
excuses for the eccentric seclusion of the host. He had gone fishing
again, of course, and must not be disturbed till the appointed hour,
though he sat within a stone's throw of where they stood.

"You see it's his only hobby," observed Harker, apologetically,
"and, after all, it's his own house; and he's very hospitable in
other ways."

"I'm rather afraid," said Fisher, in a lower voice, "that it's
becoming more of a mania than a hobby. I know how it is when a man
of that age begins to collect things, if it's only collecting those
rotten little river fish. You remember Talbot's uncle with his
toothpicks, and poor old Buzzy and the waste of cigar ashes. Hook
has done a lot of big things in his time--the great deal in the
Swedish timber trade and the Peace Conference at Chicago--but I
doubt whether he cares now for any of those big things as he cares
for those little fish."

"Oh, come, come," protested the Attorney-General. "You'll make Mr.
March think he has come to call on a lunatic. Believe me, Hook only
does it for fun, like any other sport, only he's of the kind that
takes his fun sadly. But I bet if there were big news about ti