rough-cut beams melting into the shadows of the roof and a block-floor half-covered with rugs. On a dais to our right as we entered stood a long refectory table between two rows of heavily carved Spanish oak chairs; at the far end was a grand piano; low book-cases ran round the walls, there were three or four big oil-paintings above the panelling, and arranged in half-circles round the two fires were luxuriously large sofas and arm-chairs. I was a little reminded of a college hall, when I looked at the severe table on this dais, the black-beamed roof and panelled walls; I thought of the perfect club smoking room, when I tried one of the chairs; and the whole room, as I surveyed its warm, bright emptiness from the doorway suggested a stage scene at the rise of the curtain.

"It's rather jolly, isn't it?" said my host, when I expressed my admiration. "The bedrooms are all in the new part, but, when we're not asleep, we shall feed and work and live here. Personally I never want more than one room and, if this one isn't big enough, I should like to know what is. I'm sorry my wife isn't in, she could shew you round so much better; but she's dining out to-night."

He settled the injured man in comfort on a long sofa and went to a telephone by the piano. While he waited for his call, we were invited to help ourselves from a side-table on the dais, where a generous choice of cake, sandwiches, fruit, cold meat, cheese and drinks of many kinds awaited us. He hoped that we should find something to our taste; people were apt to drop in at all hours, he assured us, so it was as well to have something handy. I poured myself out a brandy and soda and accepted one of his cigars. My young friend took for granted much that is not usually taken for granted, but I tried to harmonise with his mood and succeeded better, I think, than Grayle, who walked slowly about the room, staring at the furniture and pictures, but not committing himself to criticism. My cigar was hardly alight when the flame-coloured silk curtain over the door was drawn aside and a girl came in, looked round at us incuriously and cut herself a slice of cake. As she prepared to eat it, she caught sight of the figure on the sofa and walked quickly up to our host, who murmured something and shook his head. Five minutes later the doctor arrived, and, while he began his examination, I announced that I must go home.

"My wife will be back any minute now," our host pleaded, putting a repeater to his ear. "Are you sure you won't stay?"

"Let us come again in day-light," I said. "I'm really rather tired now. I've been travelling a lot lately."

He bowed with smiling courtesy.

"I won't keep you, but please come whenever you feel inclined to. You just push the door, as I explained——"

"Don't you ever lock it?" asked Grayle, breaking silence for the first time since we had set out from Parliament Square.

The young man's black eyes smiled wonderingly.

"Why should I?" he asked.

"Prevent things being stolen," Grayle answered.

"Nobody's stolen anything yet,—and we've been here a week! But, if anybody did steal, it would probably mean that he wanted it more than we did."

"What's your objection to locking it?" Grayle pursued.

The boy stood with his hands in his pockets, swaying backwards and forwards from heel to toe and smiling mischievously, with his luminous black eyes upon our faces.

"It seems so inhospitable!" he laughed, "and I love symbols."

"But who d'you keep it open for?" I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

"Your friend, the doctor, his patient, that lady who came in a moment ago. You, if you will come again."

"I shall certainly come again," I said, as we shook hands.

Walking along Millbank, Grayle broke into an unexpected laugh.

"I thought I'd met most kinds of lunacy," he remarked. "Fellow said he was in the House, didn't he? I must look him up in the directory to-morrow and see what their name is. 'The Sanctuary.' I suppose that's a symbol, too."

4

A reputation for honesty is often embarrassing; when coupled with efficiency, it is always disastrous. For five-and-twenty years I have reeled under the name of a "good business man," and this has exposed me to attack by every impulsive woman and woolly-headed man who has wanted something done without quite knowing how to do it, who has wished money collected without quite knowing how to set about it, who has dragged his committee and himself knee-deep into the mire of stagnant insolvency without knowing whether to go on or to struggle back. Then someone has said, "We must co-opt Mr. Raymond Stornaway."

As the reputation has long ceased to be an honour and is now only a nuisance, I propose to affect no false modesty about it. Before the war I was always being made a governor of some new school or hospital, and my success is to be measured by the fact that I almost invariably got my own way in committee—(if I was not voted into the chair at once, I overwhelmed the chairman until he yielded place)—and as invariably I raised the funds which I had been appointed to find. Perhaps I hoped that, as everyone had comfortably survived my absence for a year, I should be allowed a respite, but on the morrow of this Arabian Night of mine I was to discover that London contained as many voluble, sympathetic and unpractical women as ever, all convinced that they had only to form a committee of their friends, dispense with book-keeping, insert their photographs in the illustrated papers and stretch out both hands to a man who knew a man who had a friend on one of the daily papers.

Lady Maitland rustled in, grey-haired and majestic, as I was finishing breakfast the first morning; the Duchess of Ross starved me into submission before she would let me go down to luncheon; and by night I was duly included in the Committees of the Belgian Relief Fund, the Emergency Hospital Fund and the Prisoners of War Relief Fund. The following day Mountstuart of the Treasury wheedled me into the Deputy Commissionership of the War Charities Control Department, and I found myself after an interval of thirty years once more a Government servant, charged to see that the amateur enthusiasm of Eleanor Ross and her friends did not defraud the public too flagrantly and that a reasonable proportion of the money collected was in fact paid over to the objects for which it had been raised.

Throughout August and the first half of September I set myself to learn my new duties, spending the morning in the St. James' Street Committee rooms and the afternoon at the Eaton Hotel, where my Department had been installed in a faded coffee-room enlivened by a sardonic portrait of Lord Beaconsfield in Garter robes and made business-like by rickety trestle tables, paste pots and letter trays, internecine telephones and japanned deed-boxes earmarked as His Majesty's property by a white crown and "G.R." It took me several bashful days to grow acclimatised to the epicene life of the office, but I discovered in time and with relief that the expensive young women with the Johnsonian capacity for conversation and tea were every whit as much frightened of me as I of them. The men afforded material for my insatiable interest in my fellow creatures; we had a few journalists, a stockbroker or two, several college tutors, an elderly miscellany which had retired some years before and was returning to active service for the duration of the war, two or three men rejected or invalided out of the army and three or four whose reason for not being in the army was not so obvious—a gathering which was partly patriotic, wholly impecunious and very different from the collection of unfledged naked intelligences which were distributed through the public offices