my information is conspicuously defective, and because your conversation, your habits, your very appearance, and gestures may serve to enlighten me. I have lived among books, and objects of art of no mean value. I have enjoyed communion, both by letter and in speech, with many of the most distinguished minds of the present century. But I never associated, I have never cared to associate, with the average man of the world, of the clubs and the racecourse, the man of intrigues, of, in short, society. He appeared to me to weigh too lightly in the scale to be a worthy object of study. I ignored him, and in so doing dropped an important link out of the chain of being. For these persons breed, they perpetuate tendencies, they influence and modify the history of the race. Not to reckon with such persons, is not to reckon with a persistent and active factor in intellectual and moral evolution."

Laurence had risen to his feet. He stood with his hands behind him and his back to the fire. He was amused, but he was also slightly nettled.

"Ah!" he said, "exactly. And so you sent for me. You took for granted I was that sort. You wanted to see how we do it."

"Yes," Mr. Rivers answered, "it did appear to me that you were calculated to fulfil the conditions. In any case you were the only example of the type available. Our connection by blood, and the relation in which you stand to my property, gave me certain claims upon your time and your consideration. I wish very much to observe you. I wish to study you from the psychological and other points of view. You need not attempt to assist me. Be yourself, please. Be passive. I need no co-operation on the part of my subject. This will really give you very little trouble, while it will afford me interesting occupation during the period—whether short or protracted, I know not—which must elapse before disease has run its course and procured dissolution."

Laurence listened in silence; and while he did so, he ceased to be nettled, he ceased even to be inclined to treat these singular proposals humorously. For there appeared to him a certain pathos in the earnest desire of this recluse and student now, at the eleventh hour, to acquaint himself with just that which he had so arrogantly despised, namely the Commonplace. It was slightly wounding to personal vanity to be thus selected, from among the millions of mankind, as a fine, thorough-paced example and exponent of the Commonplace. But Laurence was kind-hearted. He also possessed a fund of practical philosophy. No—decidedly the position was not a flattering one! Yet it was rather original, and, moreover, how could one in common charity refuse any little pleasure to a dying man?

"Very well, sir," he said. "I think I quite grasp the necessities of the inquiry. I'm quite willing to be operated on, and I promise to play fair and not let the evidence be faked. But I'm afraid you'll get bored first. I am likely to be more illuminated than illuminating."

"I am obliged to you," Mr. Rivers said. "To-night I will not further detain you. Pray give any orders you please to Renshaw. He is a well-trained and responsible servant. There are horses in the stable. Good-night. I repeat that I am obliged to you."

III

Finding it unlikely that his uncle would ask for him before evening, and that consequently he had plenty of time at his disposal, Laurence embarked after breakfast upon a survey of the house. When a boy at school he had occasionally passed a couple of nights at Stoke Rivers. His recollections of these visits were not gay. He had been glad enough to go away again. It followed that his impressions of the house itself were vague and confused. He now found that it was constructed in the shape of a capital L reversed. The base of the letter, facing east and west, contained kitchens, offices, and servants' quarters. The main building—at right angles to it—was two stories in height, and consisted of suites of handsome rooms opening on to a wide corridor. The windows of the latter looked south, those of the rooms north. The colouring and furnishings resembled, in the main, those of Mr. Rivers' bedroom. Dark panelled walls, rich, sombre hangings of dark blue, crimson, or violet obtained throughout. In the drawing-rooms were some noble landscapes by Cuyp, Ruysdael, and other Dutch masters of note. There was also an admirable collection of Italian ivories, small figures of exquisite workmanship; and several glass cases containing fine antique and renaissance gems. The walls of the libraries were lined with books—a curious and varied collection, ranging from ancient black-letter volumes down to the latest German treatise, on natural science or metaphysics, of the current year. Laurence promised himself to make nearer acquaintance with these rather weighty joys at a more convenient season. Meanwhile, in contrast to the otherwise distinctly old-fashioned character of the house, he remarked a very complete installation of electric light, and an ingenious system of hot-air ventilation, by means of which a temperature of over seventy degrees was maintained throughout the whole interior. This produced a heavy and enervating atmosphere of which Laurence—fresh from the strong clean air of the Atlantic—became increasingly and disagreeably sensible. It made him at once restless and inert; and as he wandered, rather aimlessly from room to room, he was annoyed by finding a slight nervousness gained on him—he, whose nerves were usually of the steadiest, happily conspicuous by their absence, indeed, rather than by their presence!

"Upon my word, this beats the American abomination of steam heat," he said to himself.

His visit to the library, where the smell of old leather bindings added to the deadness of the air, nearly finished him. He went out on to the corridor, and paced the length of it, past the flying staircase of black oak leading to the upper corridor, and back again. A broad strip of deep-pile, crimson carpet was spread along the centre of the polished floor. On one hand, between the doors of the living-rooms, hung a collection of valuable copper-plate engravings, representing classic ruins in Italy and Greece. While on the other, in the spaces between the windows, were ranged a series of busts—Augustus, Tiberias, Nero, the two Antonines, Caligula, and Commodus—set on tall columnar pedestals of dark green or yellow marble. The blind, sculptured faces deepened the general sense of oppression by their rigidity, their unalterable and somewhat scornful repose.

Out of doors the March morning was tumultuous with wind and wet, offering marked contrast to the dry heat, the almost burdensome order and stillness reigning within. The air of the corridor was perhaps a degree fresher than that of the library he had just quitted. Laurence leaned his arms on a stone window-sill, and glanced in a desultory way at the day's Times, which he had picked up off the hall table in passing. But Chinese railway concessions, plague reports from Bombay, even the last racing fixtures, or rumours of fighting on the North-West Indian Frontier, failed to arouse his interest. In his present humour, these items of news from the outside world seemed curiously unimportant and remote. He stared at the wide, well-wooded, rain-blurred landscape. The scene at which he had assisted last night, the intimate drama moving forward relentlessly even now to its close in that well-appointed room upstairs—and the extraordinary character of the chief actor in that drama—his over-stimulated brain and atrophied affections, his greed of experiment and of acquiring information, even yet, in the very article of death—depressed Laurence's imagination as the close atmosphere depressed his body. It was all so painfully narrow, barren, hungry, joyless, somehow. And meanwhile, he, Laurence, was required to play the fool—not for the provocation of laughter, which would after all have had a semblance of cheerful good-fellowship in it. But in cold blood, as an object lesson in the