The central offices of Bullion and Bullion Ltd. were in Lombard Street. They occupied a large building constructed of ferroconcrete, on each floor of which, except the first, there was accommodation for hundreds of clerks.

The room occupied by Sir Joseph Bullion, on the first floor, was one of those apartments with very tall mantelpieces and enormous windows, which seem to have been designed for a race of giants. Certainly Sir Joseph himself, unless he had climbed on a chair, could never have rested his elbow against the mantelpiece, nor could he have deposited his cigar thereon without an unusually strenuous effort. The remaining appointments of the room, except for two or three exquisite Stuart cabinets and some priceless old masters on the walls, were designed on the same scale. Sir Joseph's own table, for instance, though of normal height, looked as if it might have been purchased by the acre, while the carpet, a huge Turkey, presented an enormously long pile, as soft as moss, to the feet. Even the chair on which the head of the firm sat was exceptionally large, and seemed to offer its occupant the constant alternative of definitely selecting either one or the other side of the extensive surface which lay between its arms.

Opposite him at a smaller table sat his chief private secretary, Denis Malster, a pale, clean-shaven, intelligent-looking young man, with mouse-coloured hair, grey eyes, and somewhat thin lips. Certainly Mrs. Delarayne must have been right about his sense of humour, for a pleasant twinkle played about his eyes, even while he was at work, which gave him the air of one amused by what he was doing.

Sir Joseph did not pretend to understand the people who served him; but having been hard driven himself in his day, he had a pretty shrewd notion of the power he could safely exercise over them, and of the duties, supplementary to the office routine, which he could reasonably induce them to fulfil. To make fourths at tennis or at bridge, to fill a gap at a Cinderella dance or at a dinner, or to help at a charity bazaar—these were some of the duties which Sir Joseph's highest personnel knew that they might be called upon to perform at any moment for one of Sir Joseph's numerous lady friends.

Thus a few days after his visit to Mrs. Delarayne, which has already been described, the Chairman of Bullion and Bullion Ltd., occupying the centre of his thronelike chair, was engaged on two tasks, either one of which would have been sufficient to occupy the wits of any ordinary man. He had before him the figures showing the business of his firm for the half year, and in the intervals of his study of these data, he was covertly watching his chief private secretary, with a view to estimating his chances of success in regard to a certain secret scheme in which this young man was to play a leading part.

Suddenly his dual activities were interrupted by the chief messenger, who, entering in his usual pompous fashion, presented a card to his chief, bearing the name Aubrey St. Maur. "The gentleman wishes to see you urgently, Sir Joseph," said the man.

Sir Joseph passed the card to his assistant, and waited for enlightenment.

Denis Malster examined it, rose, and returned it to Sir Joseph. "Lives in Upper Brook Street, Mayfair," he said; "he's evidently somebody, but I've never heard of him."

"The point is," Sir Joseph exclaimed sharply, "have I an appointment with him?"

"No, sir, you have no appointment with him," said Denis firmly, without referring to the notes on his table.

Sir Joseph was too well aware of his secretary's efficiency to doubt this assurance, and bade him go to see what Mr. Aubrey St. Maur wanted.

In a moment Denis returned. "He's from Lord Henry Highbarn," he informed his chief. "He wishes to deliver a message to you."

Sir Joseph glanced out of the huge window at his side, and appeared to take counsel of the tangle of chimney pots and telegraph wires that formed the only prospect from that side of the building. He repeated the name once or twice in a mystified manner, at length remembered the difficult task Mrs. Delarayne had asked him to perform in persuading Lord Henry to abandon his mission to China, and bade his secretary show St. Maur in.

The young man who followed Denis back into the room was a person of refined and handsome appearance, who, as he advanced towards Sir Joseph, introduced himself and explained his business with a degree of grace and composure at which even the seasoned old Stuart furniture seemed to stare in amazement.

St. Maur took a chair beside Sir Joseph's vast table, and Malster returned to his place.

"You are doubtless aware," said the stranger, "that Lord Henry was due here at this very moment."

Sir Joseph looked furtively towards his secretary and nodded.

St. Maur then proceeded to explain that owing to urgent Party duties at Westminster Lord Henry could not possibly reach Lombard Street before six o'clock that evening, and begged Sir Joseph to say whether he could see him at that hour. He was to return to Westminster at once and convey Sir Joseph's reply to Lord Henry.

The baronet fixed the appointment with Lord Henry for that hour, and St. Maur rose to go.

"Half a minute!" exclaimed Sir Joseph. "Please remain seated a moment longer, Mr. St. Maur, and tell me something about Lord Henry. I am a busy man and have not much time to keep myself informed of all these matters. Lord Henry must be a younger son of the Marquis of Firle, is he not?"

"He's the third and youngest son," replied St. Maur.

"And may I ask for details about the title;—you must think me dreadfully ignorant!"

"Not at all, sir," St. Maur answered. "It is a Charles I. creation. They are a Sussex family. As you probably know, Charles I. did not create peers indiscriminately. The Stuart creations are, on the whole, a credit to the monarchs who were responsible for them, particularly those of Charles I."

Sir Joseph nodded politely, but looked as if this information did not quite harmonise with his own conception of that prince.

"The fourth Earl of Chesterfield perhaps disgraced himself a little over Dr. Johnson," St. Maur added, "but as a rule the families who owe their rank to the Royal Martyr have upheld their great traditions with singular success. And possibly against the case of the fourth Earl of Chesterfield we may set that of the sixth Lord Byron, who gave us Childe Harold and Manfred."

Sir Joseph was genuinely interested. "Lord Henry is, I believe, a very wonderful personality," he remarked.

"You are right, sir," replied St. Maur, "very wonderful."

The young man rose again. He was a little above medium height, with dark crisp hair and a sallow complexion. His figure and features gave the impression of metallic virility: they were at once hard, supple, clean-cut, and finely moulded. His mouth was a little full, and his jaw perhaps a trifle heavy, but the deep thoughtful eyes gave a balance to his face which saved it from appearing unduly sensual.

"That is a pleasant young man," Sir Joseph declared, when St. Maur had gone.

"Yes," Denis replied half-heartedly. He, too, had been impressed by St. Maur, but not favourably. For Denis Malster, cultivated, sleek, and refined though he was, just lacked that exuberance and vitality which he had observed in St. Maur, and which made the latter so conspicuously his superior. Denis had nothing to compensate him for his tame, careful, Kensington breeding. St. Maur, on the other hand, had that fire and warmth of blood, without which even the highest breeding is little more than the extirpation of the animal at the expense of the man. Denis was an easy winner with the women of his class, precisely because of the parade which, in his face, nature made of his gentle antecedents; but he had sufficient intelligence to realise that when women are confronted by a man possessing all he possessed, besides that something more that was noticeable in St. Maur the best of them do not hesitate a second in selecting the St. Maur type.

"I wonder if that is all true about Charles I.?" Sir Joseph demanded with a little irritation.

Denis leant back in his chair and his eyes twinkled. "I doubt whether it is true of Charles I.," he said; "but it certainly isn't true of his son and heir, for Charles II. used the peerage more or less as a sort of foundling hospital for his various illegitimate offspring."

Sir Joseph smiled, as he frequently did, at his secretary's odd way of summing up a case, and then quickly resuming his gravity, glanced searchingly at Denis as if pondering whether the word of such a man could confidently be taken against that of an Aubrey St. Maur. For some minutes he paced the rug in front of the fire-place, his hands behind his back, and his head bowed. At last he raised his eyes and looked more affably than usual at his assistant.

"You know, Malster," he began, "I've been thinking for some time that although you appear to take to this work less quickly than some men I have had, you are on the whole trying your hardest—are you not?"

Denis, a little startled by the palpable injustice of this remark, rose, and resting the points of his fingers lightly on the table, leant forward. "Ye—yes, sir," he stammered.

"'Ow old are you?" Sir Joseph continued.

"Twenty-eight, sir."

Sir Joseph repeated the words. "How much are you getting?"

"Eight hundred, sir," Denis replied.

Sir Joseph turned sharply on his heel and slightly accelerated his pace across the rug.

"H'm! Well, I propose to make it a thousand," he said thoughtfully.

Denis Malster smiled nervously. "Thank you, Sir Joseph."

"I propose to do this," continued the baronet, "because I think you must be wanting to marry, and because I think it wrong that a man of your age should be prevented from marrying owing to lack of means. D'you understand? Only that!"

"I think it most considerate of you," Denis faltered again.

"Well, that's settled," said Sir Joseph drily. "But," he added, always on tenterhooks of anxiety lest one of his staff should begin to think too much of himself, "I should like you to be quite clear about my reasons for the change. I don't want you to run away with the notion that I am giving you a rise because I am entirely satisfied with your work."

As he said this Sir Joseph resumed his seat, and pulled in his heavy chair as smartly as he was able, with the air of a man who had neatly achieved his object without abandoning the usual safe-guards.

It was a minute to six when the messenger announced Lord Henry Highbarn, and the moment the announcement was made, Denis, reaching for his hat and stick, took leave of his chief. He strode out into the street with a sprightly gait, humming as he went:

There is probably in most men a sense of quality, a power of divination in regard to value which, on occasions when they are confronted by a stranger whose worth they do not know, informs them immediately of the comparative rarity or commonness of his type. This sense may at first be baffled by the delusive disguises in which men sometimes present themselves, but as a rule a chance word, an artless gesture, or even a glance, quickly corrects the initial error of the eye, and in a moment the original estimate is adjusted to the unmistakable evidence of a definite quality.

When this peculiar apprehensiveness in regard to worth becomes aware of any marked superiority in a fellow creature,—an experience which in unhappy lives very seldom occurs,—a feeling of certainty usually accompanies it, which is as mysterious as the evidence upon which it is based is intangible and elusive. A man knows that he has met his superior, he knows too how far the superiority he recognises extends, and he is conscious of experiencing something exceptional, something exquisitely precious.

That such encounters are becoming every day more rare, probably explains the increasing growth, in modern times, of that kind of disbelief and heresy which, far from being wanton, arises from a total inability to envisage greatness, whether in kings, ideals, or gods. For we arrive at our most exalted images, not by solitary flights of imagination unassisted, but by actual progressive steps in the world of concrete things; so that the spring-board from which we take our final leap into the highest concepts of what a god might be, is always the highest man we happen to have met. We can have no other starting-point. Hence in an age when greatness among men is too rare to be felt as a universal fact, a disbelief in all gods is bound sooner or later to supervene.

When Lord Henry Highbarn presented himself before Sir Joseph, it was plain from the meek droop of the baronet's eyelids and the subdued hesitating tone of his voice, that something in the young nobleman's appearance had like a flash intimated to the experienced financial magnate that here was someone of a quality as unfamiliar as it was rare. Moreover, the difference which the older man felt distinguished him from his visitor was of a kind too fundamental and insuperable to challenge even that friendly rivalry so instinctive between two natures each conscious of their own particular efficiency and excellence.

Indeed, it needed all the elaborate complications of our modern civilisation to account even for the meeting of these two people under the same roof, not to speak of the fact that they met on an equal footing.

The one, a plain but not unpretentious man of business, still a little perplexed by his stupendous success, and not yet certain of his precise social level, revealed in his unshapely but kindly features the modest rung on which Nature herself would probably have placed him, if the peculiar economic conditions of his Age had not intervened to bring about a different result; while two characteristics alone led one to suspect his latent power,—his large energetic hands with their powerful spatulate fingers, and his masterful and meditative dark eyes.

The other,—a tall, muscular, youthful-looking aristocrat, with deep-set thoughtful blue eyes, a straight finely-chiselled nose, and a full eloquent mouth (the whole overshadowed by an unusually lofty brow, from which, particularly over the temples, the hair had noticeably receded)—possessed that unconscious ease of manner and unassertive masterfulness of bearing, which derive on the one hand from breeding, and on the other from a constant habit of preoccupation with external problems, that is unfavourable to any self-concern. As his alert vision took in the details of his surroundings, including the person of Sir Joseph himself, on whom he appeared to cast only the most casual sidelong glances, it was clear that his mind, far from being occupied with internal questionings, was measuring even then the probable extent to which this visit might serve some ultimate important purpose upon which the whole gravity and earnestness of his being seemed to be concentrated; and if his solemn features occasionally relaxed into a smile, it was precisely the habitual gravity of his mien that lent his passing levity such extraordinarily persuasive merriness.

It was chiefly Lord Henry's air of preoccupation that set Sir Joseph so quickly at his ease. For although the baronet was familiar enough with the sons of peers and peers themselves,—for had he not a number of them on his various boards?—there was, as we have seen, something more than mere rank in his youthful visitor to disturb him.

While the first courteous platitudes were being exchanged, Sir Joseph quietly took stock of his companion, and was for a brief moment a little perturbed by the latter's unconventional attire.

We have noticed that though he was young, Lord Henry's hair receded a little from his brow, and made it appear even loftier than it actually was. Between the high bald temples, however, a wisp of stiff fair hair still remained over the centre of the young man's forehead, somewhat resembling that seen in the portraits of Napoleon, and with this tuft his long well-shaped and sensitive fingers would play continuously while he spoke, with the result that he constantly bowed his head.

Occasionally, therefore, when his customary gravity gave way for a space and his face was irradiated with a smile or a laugh, an expression of such irresistible and almost wicked mirth suffused his features, owing to the upward glance he was constrained to give you from the bowed angle of his head, that willy-nilly you were compelled to laugh with him.

Sir Joseph felt this; he was also aware of the peculiar charm of it; but what struck him even more forcibly were Lord Henry's loose-fitting and apparently badly cut clothes. Anyone else so clad would have looked hopelessly dowdy, while the carelessly knotted green tie that bulged all askew from beneath the young man's ample collar, seemed for a moment almost offensive.

It was strange how the displeasure provoked by these shortcomings in his attire gradually vanished beneath the steady persuasiveness of the wearer's fascinating personality; and very soon not only had Sir Joseph ceased from feeling their aggressiveness, but had actually begun to associate them inseparably with the strange charm of the creature before him.

"Mrs. Delarayne," said Lord Henry, "would give me no peace until I came to see you, Sir Joseph, so you must forgive me for forcing myself upon you in this way, and relying for your forbearance simply upon the strength of the friendship you bear her."

He laughed, and Sir Joseph perforce laughed with him.

"'Ave you seen her lately?" the baronet enquired.

"She's always seeing me," Lord Henry replied, smiling in a manner that was at once childishly winsome and wise. He was still startlingly boyish, despite his thirty-three years, and though his slight baldness added a few years to his face, he did not look a month older than five-and-twenty.

"She is very fond of you," Sir Joseph proceeded earnestly, beginning to feel, for the first time, not only that Mrs. Delarayne's infatuation was clearly justified, but also that young St. Maur had probably been right in his remarks concerning Charles I.'s creations. It was strange to recognise the evidences of unusual wisdom in such a childish face; it reminded him vaguely of what he had heard or dreamt of Chinese mandarins,—evidently such phenomena were possible.

"She's an amazingly captivating woman," muttered Lord Henry, still pulling at the tuft of hair over his brow. "Her blank refusal to accept the fact of her advancing years is the most wonderful and at the same time the most pathetic thing about her."

Sir Joseph, with an expression of deep curiosity, leant heavily over the right arm of his chair, and stared expectantly at his visitor.

"She has not had her second decisive love affair, you see," Lord Henry continued. "And every day she arrays herself to experience it,—that second and decisive love affair which alone reconciles the best women to old age and to snow-white locks."

Sir Joseph fidgeted. He did not understand, but thought he did. "Her second and decisive love affair," he repeated,—"yes."

"We are apt to forget," continued Lord Henry, "that all deep, decently constituted women have two definite relationships to man, one alone of which is insufficient to satisfy them. The first is their relationship of wife to the man more or less of their own generation whom they have loved; the second is the relationship of mother to the man of their children's generation, whom under favourable circumstances they worship."

Sir Joseph shifted in his chair, raised his hand to his chin and looked fixedly at the speaker.

"This last and most precious relationship is the only one that reconciles a woman to her wrinkles and makes her happy in her grey hairs. Without it she takes to peroxide, smooths out her wrinkles with cream, and what is even more tragic, developes a tendency to pursue the young men of her children's generation. People call it ridiculous, lunatic,—so it would be, if it were not so nobly, so terribly pathetic."

"But I have known women with grown-up sons behave exactly as Mrs. Delarayne behaves," Sir Joseph objected with as much breath as he could summon in his surprise at what Lord Henry had said.

"Not sons with whom they are in love," Lord Henry corrected. "Most mothers have sons, but of these not all experience that great love for one of their male offspring which is perhaps the most beautiful, the most passionate, and the most permanent of earthly relationships. Mrs. Delarayne is obviously a woman who would have been capable of such a relationship had she only had a son."

"Is it only one particular son?" Sir Joseph enquired with an unconscious note of profound humility in his voice.

"Always—yes!"

Lord Henry, still tugging at his wisp of hair, now turned to Sir Joseph, and blinking very quickly, as was his wont when deeply absorbed in a subject, contemplated the baronet for a moment in silence.

"Doesn't that clear up the problem of Mrs. Delarayne a little for you?" he asked at last. "Believe me, few women care to admit that they are thirty-five unless they have a husband whom they love, and still fewer women resign themselves to their fiftieth year unless they are wrapped up in a beloved son."

Sir Joseph, to whom Mrs. Delarayne, except for her repeated refusals of his hand, had never been precisely a problem, demurred a little. "It certainly sheds some light,—yes," he said slowly. "But don't you think that a second great love with a man more or less of her own generation is equally satisfying to a woman like that?"

"How can it be when it is simply a repetition of a former and thoroughly explored experience?" Lord Henry replied. "I do not mean, mind you, that great-hearted women who have not enjoyed that exquisite relationship to a beloved son, are conscious that it is this circumstance which has been lacking in their lives. Because precious little whatever is conscious in the best women. But in their loathing and repudiation of advancing years, and in their repeated attachments to men of my generation, such women reveal to the psychologist the constant ache they feel from the vast empty chamber in their hearts."

For some moments Sir Joseph played idly with an ivory paper-knife on his desk. He had completely forgotten the object of Lord Henry's visit. It was as if he had always known the man, and that they were just having one of their usual pleasant chats after their work was done. Such was the power that Lord Henry possessed of immersing his listeners in the thoughts that occupied his mind.

"And this," continued the younger man, after a while, "is the only consideration which makes me feel I ought to marry. I mean that it almost amounts to wanton vandalism not to give a wife of one's choice and a son of one's own begetting at least the chance of beautifying the world by this most wonderful of all relationships."

"You are a poet," said Sir Joseph with that spontaneous penetration of which the uncultivated are sometimes capable.

"If to understand Mrs. Delarayne a man must be a poet, then I am one," Lord Henry replied, smiling in his irresistible way.

Sir Joseph perforce smiled too, and the return to earth which this faint levity signified, reminded him of the real object of the young nobleman's visit. The thought did not reassure him, however; for after all the intelligence he had been able to glean regarding his visitor's character, he realised that if Lord Henry had resolved to undertake this mission to China, it would obviously serve no purpose to exhort him to change his mind. It was clear that Mrs. Delarayne could not have understood the man she was dealing with; or, if she had, she must have urged this step as a last hope.

As a forlorn hope it certainly appeared to Sir Joseph, and it was only half-heartedly that he opened the attack.

"And now tell me about China," he said. "Have you quite made up your mind?"

Lord Henry rose, thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets, and paced the hearth-rug.

"I think so," he replied, musing deeply as he glanced from one to the other of Sir Joseph's art treasures.

"But you are doing good here," the baronet protested feebly. "What good will you do in China?"

"I'm not convinced that I am doing good here," Lord Henry rejoined sharply. "That's precisely the point."

"But everybody says you are."

"No doubt."

Sir Joseph turned to his ivory paper-knife. He did not understand.

"If it's doing good," Lord Henry added, "to salve the nervous wreckage that our unspeakable Western civilisation produces with every generation; if it's doing good to render the disastrous mess which we have made of human life possible for a few years longer, by bringing relief to the principal victims of it; then, indeed, I am a desirable member of society. But I question the whole thing. I question very much whether it can be doing good to help this hopeless condition of things to last one moment longer than it need."

Sir Joseph glanced up a little anxiously. "Are you serious?" he enquired.

Lord Henry sat down again.

"Am I serious?" he scoffed. "Can you be serious, can you be sane, and expect me to think otherwise? But you have been a great success by means of the very system which is rotten and iniquitous to the core. How could you sympathise?"

Sir Joseph stammered hopelessly that he was trying to sympathise.

"You are no doubt convinced," Lord Henry continued, "that all you are witnessing to-day is what you would call Progress. And the further we recede from a true understanding of human life and its most vital needs, and the more we complicate the world and increase its machinery, the more persuaded you become of the reality of your illusion. How could it be otherwise?"

Sir Joseph expostulated ineffectually, and Lord Henry continued:

"Still, I am not a reformer," he said. "I do not wish to reform, even if I could. It is not only too late, things are also too desperate. What I chiefly want is to take refuge somewhere where humanity and its deepest needs are the subject of greater mastery, greater understanding; so that I can cease from being distracted by the immensity of modern error. No great intellect, no great creative power can exist in this country; because the moment it becomes conscious it is so obsessed by the shams and the shamelessness that surround it, that instead of devoting itself to the joys and enrichment of life, it feels impelled by the horrors on every side to take up the social system and attempt to put it right. This sterile pitfall is now the temptation of the greatest minds. Your Shelley, your Coleridge, even your Byron,—what did they do? Menaced by this same vortex of negative effort, sentenced to intellectual annihilation if they attempted to straighten out the muddle of modernity, they fled, or drowned themselves in water or opium."

He had ceased playing with his tuft of hair. His face was distraught with indignation and with the bitterness of a thwarted love of mankind; it was also illuminated by the distant dream of a world as he would have it, so that though he brought down his fist on the corner of Sir Joseph's table with some weight, the baronet was too much moved to notice the gesture.

"Things are so bad," he pursued, lightly lowering his voice, "that to have any genuine insight to-day, any special human feeling to-day, means perforce to devote these gifts to the social problem, instead of to art and to beauty. That is the curse of being born into this Age. The gigantic ghastliness of modern Western civilisation successfully engulfs every superior brain that comes to being in its midst."

Sir Joseph fell back limply in his chair. He acknowledged the game was lost before the struggle had actually begun. How could he presume to strike a bargain with such a man? He remembered Mrs. Delarayne, however, and braced himself once more.

"There are times," Lord Henry began again, glancing kindly at Sir Joseph, "when I feel that perhaps I ought at least to risk even my life in order to do something here, in this country. But what is one man's life in the face of this sea of blunders? What is even a giant's effort, against the Lilliputian swarm of modern men who are determined to gain the precipice?"

"I was hoping," said Sir Joseph quietly, "that I might make you an offer which would induce you to abandon this mission to the Far East. I was hoping, in fact, that I might help you."

Lord Henry glanced thoughtfully at the baronet and then shook his head.

Sir Joseph, more and more convinced that he was embarking on a hopeless enterprise, persisted notwithstanding.

"I am prepared to put a considerable sum of money at your disposal," he said. "I believe your sanatorium for nervous disorders in Kent is a veritable public boon. I feel that I could not find a nobler public object for my wealth than to support you in your work."

Lord Henry rapped his fingers on his knees impatiently.

"Could I not assist you in enlarging this establishment? Could I not give it a permanent foundation or effect what alterations in it you may suggest for its improvement and greater utility? If by the same token I succeeded in retaining you in England, I feel I should in addition be doing a personal service to someone, to a lady, for whom you and I have a very deep respect."

Lord Henry blinked rapidly as he turned to face the old gentleman at his side, and his smile was kind and courteous.

"If, Sir Joseph, my only motive in going abroad were indeed to transact the business of the Society for Anthropological Research, I might perhaps be induced to yield to the temptation you so generously put in my way. But seeing that possibly my principal object is to give my endowments a fair chance away from this whirlpool of confusion, which makes social reform a morbid idÉe fixe, I cannot persuade myself that it would be worth while."

"But supposing," Sir Joseph persisted lamely, "I gave you carte-blanche to extend your work as you liked?"

"And with what object?"

"I have told you the object," the baronet replied mildly.

"No!" exclaimed the younger man with emphasis. "The object would be to add to the organisations which are springing up everywhere for the purpose of making our impossible civilisation possible for at least a little while longer. That would be the ultimate object."

"How much would you require?" Sir Joseph suggested in his most melting tones, still clinging desperately to his belief in the only bait he possessed.

Lord Henry laughed despondently. "Only enough to purchase sufficient dynamite to blow my present sanatorium skywards," he said. Then resuming his gravity and rising, he extended a hand to the baronet.

"No," he added, "I'm afraid my mind is made up. I must leave this country, Mrs. Delarayne or no Mrs. Delarayne. Thank you very much indeed, all the same. I have seen you and enjoyed our talk. Mrs. Delarayne's behest has at least been strictly obeyed."

"When will you be leaving?" Sir Joseph enquired, gracefully throwing down his cards.

"In about three months' time, I expect."

"I am sorry, very sorry," ejaculated the baronet.

The two men walked gravely to the door.

On the threshold Lord Henry stopped, and looking methodically round the room, pointed at last to one of the most beautiful of Sir Joseph's Stuart cabinets.

"You also unconsciously acknowledge that there is something revolting and intolerable about this Age, Sir Joseph," he said smiling mischievously; "otherwise why do you use your wealth to surround yourself both here, and as I understand at Brineweald too, with all the treasures of art that were produced by our ancestors."

Lord Henry laughed again; his deep thoughtful eyes filled with the tears of mirth, and he vanished from the room leaving Sir Joseph contemplating his costly old furniture with feelings of utter bewilderment.