his breast; but all this is closed in by an iron grille when normal people leave the City, and the staff has to enter through a small door at the back, which is guarded by an old and surly porter, over the window of whose box hangs a peremptory and uncleanly notice forbidding anyone to smoke in the building.

Douglas Kelly ignored both the porter and the notice, and went straight up to the second floor, where, after a moment's parley with a weary-looking secretary, he and Jimmy were admitted to the editor's room.

Somehow, Jimmy had always pictured the editor of a great daily as a plethoric person with keen eyes, and a background of leather-bound volumes; but this one was thin and insignificant; there was not a single book in his room, and, at the first glance, Jimmy was inclined to believe that his friend had been right when he spoke of the editor singing in a chapel choir. Yet, after Kelly had introduced him briefly, as an old colleague, and Dodgson had put a few curt questions, Grierson began to change his mind.

Jimmy could talk well. He had, in an unusual degree, the art of putting things vividly and crisply, and he possessed an extraordinary memory for those little details which give actuality to the picture. When he described the shooting of a presidential candidate, Dodgson could see the man with his grimy hands and torn collar, crumpling up as the volley from the firing party caught him. The editor himself had never come in contact with crude realities such as this—a London County Councillor escaping by a hair's breadth from a fully-deserved conviction for corruption over a tramway contract was the nearest approach he had witnessed—but he understood the value of Jimmy's reminiscences, and, without a moment's hesitation, he asked him for an article, hinting plainly that, if the written matter were as good as his spoken words, the paper would be glad of many others.

Jimmy left the room with an unwonted sense of elation. Kelly had withdrawn immediately he had introduced his friend, but he was waiting in the doorway. "Well, what did you do?" he asked.

"He's going to give me a chance," Jimmy answered. Kelly nodded. "Of course he will. He must. I introduced you. Don't you realise, James Grierson, that I am a man they dare not offend, because the great fool-public wants stuff with my signature; and, if the Record upset me, I could go across the road to the Herald and, perhaps, get a bigger salary? It's all a game of bluff, as I told you years ago in that fan-tan shop in Shanghai. I know you won't bluff through as I have done, because you have a streak of—what shall I call it?—early Victorian modesty, in you; but still you will come out on top, because you've got brains, instead of the whisky-soaked sponge which occupies the space behind the brow of the average Fleet Street man."

"I shouldn't think you're very popular in Fleet Street," Jimmy remarked grimly.

Douglas Kelly shrugged his shoulders. "The ruck would dislike me anyway, because I know more than it does. Still, it need not worry. I am going to quit journalism, and go in for fiction soon, as you will do in due course.... What's the time?" They had come out into Fleet Street again, and he glanced upwards at the Telegraph's clock. "Half-past ten. It's too late to take you down to stay at my place, as I can't telephone to my wife. So I may as well stay in town. We'll wander round a bit, and after closing time, I'll take you up to one of my clubs."

"Your wife. So you're married?" Jimmy smiled, as though at some recollection. "You seem to have done pretty well all round; whilst I am still where I was."

The other took him up sharply, "Still where you were. Why, you've got your head full of copy, and you're right at your market, instead of being on that forsaken China Coast. Well, let's have a drink here for a start."

CHAPTER III

Jimmy awoke in the morning with a slight headache, and a fixed determination not to go out again with Douglas Kelly. True, it had cost him nothing, Kelly having carried him from one club to another, cashing a cheque at each, and spending the proceeds with such freedom as to evoke a protest from his guest.

"I want to impress you," Kelly had retorted. "I want to show you how well I've done. I always do the same when I get hold of any of you fellows from out there. Yet," he paused and looked at the other keenly, "you're such a queer beggar, that I don't suppose you are impressed. I needn't have tried it on you, after all," but, none the less, he had declined to let his companion go, and it had been past three when a sleepy night porter admitted Jimmy to the hotel, Kelly having declared his intention of taking a room at the club they had visited last.

Jimmy drew up his blind to find the sun shining in a cloudless sky, and his spirits went up at once. As a result of the deluge of the night before, London looked almost clean and bright, and he began to wonder at his depression of the previous evening. After all, it was very good to be home again, and, thanks to Kelly, he had already made a small start, which might lead to much bigger things. Kelly, himself, had arrived in England with nothing, an unknown man.

From Kelly, his mind worked backwards to the girl he had seen enter the cab. It was curious how her face seemed fixed in his memory. The thought of her, and of her possible story, worried him all the time he was shaving, and he found himself wishing he had never noticed her. Somehow, he did not like the look of her companion, who seemed to treat her with a very perfunctory sort of courtesy, verging on familiarity, or even contempt. He was still thinking of her when he went down to breakfast; but the sight of a copy of the Record, the first real English daily he had seen for many years, a paper, moreover, which wanted him to write for it, changed the current of his thoughts, and he forgot all about the girl.

Dodgson had told him there was no hurry for the article, any time within the next week or so would do, and he, himself, knew that it would be impossible to write in the dreary atmosphere of the hotel; so he decided to go down to the City and call on his brother, Walter. There was no one else he wanted to see in town. All his former acquaintances had dropped clean out of his life, or, rather, he had dropped out of theirs; and, probably, he could not have found one of them, even had he wished to do so, which was not the case. He was a very lonely man, he told himself; and yet he did not feel bitter about that fact as he had done on the previous night; his meeting with Kelly, and the new hope with which the other had infused him, had changed his views greatly. Now, it seemed as if he had a prospect of doing something definite, of starting on a new career, his success in which would depend entirely on his own exertions.

Walter Grierson was a short, clean-shaven man with a decidedly pompous manner. He had been very successful in his profession, owing to his energy, rather than to his mental capacity, and he regarded unsuccessful men as little better than criminals. His whole outlook on life was severe, except in his own home, where he was a generous husband and indulgent father. Never having been tempted himself, he had no sympathy with those who fell, being quite unable to understand them. Steadiness was the virtue he most admired in younger men, meaning by that term the capacity for choosing and sticking to an orthodox method of livelihood and for maintaining an unwavering respectability of conduct. Jimmy's career, the wanderings from