Musingly I mounted an eastward-bound bus and sought my office. The more I thought things over the less able I became to shake off the sense of accumulating trifles, of gathering events. And it was as I passed through Pimlico that yet another incident, temporarily forgotten, came back into my mind. This was the curious way in which Esdaile had snapped—it had been a snap—when Rooke had wanted to sweep up the broken picture-glass, to draw the studio blinds back again, and to return the bottle of curaÇao to its place in the cellar. "You've done enough for one morning," Esdaile had said. What had Monty done that was "enough"?

Now I have known Monty Rooke, as I told you, for a dozen years, and in that time I have learned not to be surprised at anything he does provided it is sufficiently out of the way, unprofitable to himself, and unlike anything an ordinary person would have done. I will give you an instance of what I mean.

A year or two before there had arrived one night at his studio a bundle of washing, fresh from the laundry. This bundle, on being opened, had proved to contain a fully-developed infant girl of a fortnight old, no doubt the pledge of some unknown laundrymaid's betrayed trust. As a joke you will see the possibilities of this, particularly in the merry Chelsea Arts Club; but don't imagine that Monty was a butt. What he did was enough to dispel that idea. He had immediately wanted to adopt the foundling, and would certainly have done so but for the strong dissuasion of his friends; whereupon he had made a drawing instead, a drawing quite singular for its wistfulness and emotion and depth, of the infant just as it had arrived, with the newly-ironed shirts and socks for its cot, deriving none knew whence, cast for none knew what part in Life, save for Monty friendless, the close of one obscure drama but the beginning of another.

That was Monty, our little friend of the warm, unprofitable impulses, the shy and easily daunted manner, but also of the quiet persistence of purpose that kept him afloat in his seas of petty difficulties and enabled him once in a while to produce a drawing or a painting that you returned to again and again, a bit of philosophy that cut clean down to the quick of things, or—an indiscretion that it would hardly have occurred to one in a million to commit.

What was there between him and Esdaile now?