A white October mist lay over the Heath, and the smell of burning leaves came in at the pond-room window of Dorothy Tasker's flat. But the smell was lost on Dorothy. All her intelligence was for the moment concentrated in one faculty, the faculty of hearing. She was sure Jackie had swallowed a safety-pin, and she was anxiously listening for the click with which it might come unstuck.

"Shall I send for the doctor, m'm?" said Ruth, who stood holding the doorknob in her aproned hand. She had been called away from her "brights," and there was a mournful relish of Jackie's plight on her face.

"No," said Dorothy.... "Oh, I know there were twelve of them, and now there are only eleven!... Have you put one of these things into your mouth, Jackie?"

"He put it up his nose, mumsie, like he did some boot-buttons once," said Noel cheerfully.

"But he couldn't do that.... Have you swallowed it, Jackie?"

"Mmm," said Jackie resolutely, as who should say that that which his hand (or in this case his mouth) found to do he did with all his might.

"Oh dear!" sighed Dorothy, leaning back in her chair....

She supposed it was the still white weather that weighed on her spirits; she hoped so, for if it was not that it was something worse. Even dreary weather was better than bankruptcy. She had sent her pass-book to the bank to be balanced; until it should come back she refused to look at the pile of tradesmen's books that stood on her writing-desk; and borrowing from her aunt was not borrowing at all, but simply begging, since Aunt Grace regarded the return of such loans as the last of affronts.

And (she sighed again) she had been so well-off at the time of her marriage! Why, she had had well over a thousand a year from Hallowell and Smith's alone!... But Stan had had a few debts which had had to be settled, and Stan's knowledge of the style in which things ought to be done had been rather a drawback on that trip they had taken to the Riviera, for his ideas of hotels had been a little splendacious, and of dinners to "a few friends" rather daring; and, with one thing and another, the problem of how to satisfy champagne tastes on a beer income had never been really satisfactorily solved by Stan, poor old boy. And he never, never grumbled at home, not even when the cold beef came on three evenings together, which was harder on him than it was on most people. He did what he could to earn, too. It wasn't his fault that the standard of efficiency in the Army was so impracticably high, nor that he had been packed off to try his luck in Canada with the disadvantage of being a remittance-man, nor that, at the age of twenty-seven, when his father had died, he had had to turn to and compete for this job or that with a horde of capable youngsters years his juniors and with fewer hampering decencies. It was his father's fault and Aunt Susan's really, for having sent him to Marlborough and Sandhurst without being able to set him properly on his feet afterwards. Such victims of circumstances, on a rather different level, made husbands who stopped at home and cleaned the knives and took the babies out in the perambulator. In Stan's case the natural result had been to make a young man fit only to join as a ranker or to stand with his back to a mirror in a suspect card-room.

"Shall I take him away, m'm?" Mrs. Mossop asked—("And prepare his winding-sheet," her tone seemed to add).

"Yes, do," Dorothy replied, with a glance at Ruth's blackened hands. "And please make yourself fit to be seen, Ruth. You know you oughtn't to be doing all that on the very day I let Norah out."

She knew that her rebuke had set Ruth up in the melancholy enjoyment of resentment for half a week, but she was past caring. Ruth rose an inch in height at being chidden for the faithful performance of her most disagreeable duties; she turned; and as she bore the Bits away the mighty roar into which Jackie broke diminished in volume down the passage.

Dorothy sighed, that all her troubles should thus crowd on her at once. Her eyes fell again on the tradesmen's books. It hardly seemed worth while to pay them, since they would only come in again next week, as clamourous and urgent as ever. They were thrust through the letterbox like letters; Dorothy knew very well the thud with which they fell on the floor; but she could never help running out into the hall when they came. She had tried the plan of dispensing with books altogether and paying for everything in cash as she got it, but that had merely meant, not one large worry a week, but harassing little ones all the week through.

Oh, why had she squandered, or allowed Stan to squander, those good round sovereigns of Hallowell and Smith's!——

Still—there is measure in everything—she had not sent her pass-book to the bank in order to learn whether she had a balance. That would have been too awful. It was the amount of her margin that she wanted, and feared, to know. For presently there would be the doctor to pay, and so many guineas a week at the Nursing Home, and the flat going on just the same, and poor old Stan pathetically hoping that a casual dinner-table puff in a Marlborough voice would result in fat new ledger-accounts for Fortune and Brooks' and magnificent commissions for himself. If only she could get just a little ahead of her points! But the money went out just slightly quicker than it came in. Stan carved it as it were in twopences off the cold beef, the Bits swallowed it in pennorths with their breadcrumbs and gravy, and directly the strain eased for a little, down swooped the rent and set everything back again exactly where it had been three months before.

And the Income Tax people had actually sent Stan a paper, wanting to know all about his income from lands, hereditaments, etc., and warning him that his wife's income must be accounted as part of his own!

But it must not be supposed that Dorothy had allowed things to come to this pass without having had an idea. She had an idea, and one that she thought a very good one. Nevertheless, an idea is one thing, and the execution thereof at the proper time quite another. For example, the proper moment for the execution of this idea of Dorothy's was certainly now, or at any rate at the Christmas Quarter (supposing she herself was up and about again by that time and had found a satisfactory sub-tenant for the flat). But the person against whom her idea was designed—who, by the way, happened to be her unsuspecting and much-loved aunt, Lady Tasker—was a very present difficulty. Dorothy knew for a fact that what would be admirably convenient for herself at Christmas could not possibly be convenient to her aunt until, at the very earliest, next summer. That was the crab—the intervening period of nine months. She knew of no mandragora that would put herself, Stan and her Bits of Impudence gently to sleep, to wake up again to easier times.

Oh, why had she spent those beautiful thick sovereigns of Hallowell and Smiths' so recklessly!—

The mist lay flat over the pond outside, making in one corner of it a horrible scum, from which the swans, seeking their food, lifted blackened necks. There was never a ripple on the pond-room walls to-day. Slowly Dorothy rose. Moping was useless; she must do something. She crossed to her writing-desk and took from one of its drawers a fat file, concertina-ed like her own accordion-pleated skirts; and she sat down and opened it fan-wise on her knee. It was full of newspaper-cuttings, draft "ideas" for advertisements, and similar dreary things. She sighed again as her listless fingers began to draw them out. She had not thought at one time that she would ever come to this. By a remarkable piece of luck and light-heartedness and ingenuity she had started at Hallowell and Smith's at the top of the tree; the brains of underlings had been good enough to cudgel for such scrap-stuff as filled her concertina-file; but that was all changed now. Light come, light go; and since the lapse of her contracts she had been glad not only to devise these ignoble lures for the public, but to draw them also. They formed the pennies-three-farthings that came in while Stan carved the twopences from the joint. She had thought the good times were going to last for ever. They hadn't. She now looked enviously up to those who had been her own subordinates.

With no heart in her task at all, Dorothy set about the drafting of an advertisement.

She was just beginning to forget about swallowed safety-pins, and poor luckless Stan, and guineas for her Nursing Home, and the prospect of presently having seven mouths, big and little, to feed—she was even beginning to cease to hear the clamour of the Bits in the room along the passage—when there came a ring at the bell. Her fair head did not move, but her blue eyes stole abstractedly sideways as Ruth passed the pond-room door. Then a man's voice sounded, and Dorothy dropped her pen....

"Mrs. Tasker," she had heard, with the "a" cut very short and two "s's" in her name....

The next moment Ruth had opened the pond-room door, and, in tones that plainly said "You needn't think that I've forgotten about just now, because I haven't," announced: "Mr. Miller."

Now it was curious that Dorothy had just been thinking about Mr. Miller. Mr. Miller was Hallowells' Publicity Manager, and the time had been when Dorothy had had Mr. Miller completely in her pocket. She had obtained that comfortable contract of hers from Mr. Miller, and if during the latter part of its continuance she had taken her duties somewhat lightly and her pleasures with enormous gusto, she was not sure that Mr. Miller had not done something of the same kind. But the firm, which could excuse itself from a renewal of her own contract, for some reason or other could not get rid of Mr. Miller; and now here was Mr. Miller unexpectedly in Dorothy's flat—seeking her, which is far better for you than when you have to do the seeking. He stood there with his grey Trilby in his hand and his tailor-made deltoids almost filling the aperture of the doorway.

"There, now, if I wasn't right!" said Mr. Miller with great satisfaction, advancing with one hand outstretched. "I fixed it all up with myself coming along that you'd be around the house. I've had no luck all the week, and I said to myself as I got out of the el'vator at Belsize Park, 'It's doo to change.' And here I find you, right on the spot. I hope this is not an introosion. How are you? And how's Mr. Stan?"

He shook hands heartily with Dorothy, and looked round for a place in which to put his hat and stick.

"Why, now, this is comfortable," he went on, drawing up the chair to which Dorothy pointed. "I like your English fires. They may not have all the advantages of steam-heat, but they got a look about 'em—the Home-Idee. And you're looking just about right in health, Mrs. Tasker, if I may say so. You English women have our N'York ladies whipped when it comes to complexion, you have for sure. And how's the family——?"

But here Mr. Miller suddenly stopped and looked at Dorothy again. If the look that came into his eyes had come into those of a young unmarried woman, Dorothy would have fled there and then. He dropped his head for a moment as people do who enter a church; then he raised it again.

"If you'll pardon an old married man and the father of three little goils," Mr. Miller said, his eyes reverently lifted and his voice suddenly altered, "—but am I right in supposing that ... another little gift from the storks, as my dear old Mamie—that was my dear old negro nurse—used to say?" Then, without waiting for the unrequired answer, he straightened his back and squared his deltoids in a way that would have made any of Holbein's portraits of Henry the Eighth look like that of a slender young man. His voice dropped three whole tones, and again he showed Dorothy the little bald spot on the crown of his head.

"I'm glad. I say I'm glad. I'm vurry glad. I rejoice. And I should like to shake Mr. Stan by the hand. I should like to shake you by the hand too, Mrs. Tasker." Then, when he had done so: "It's the Mother-Idee. The same, old-fashioned Idee, like our own mothers. It makes one feel good. Reverent. I got no use for a young man but what he shows lats of reverence for his mother. The old Anglo-Saxon-Idee—reverence for motherhood.... And when, if an old married man may ask the question——?"

Dorothy laughed and blushed and told him. Mr. Miller, dropping his voice yet another tone, told her in return that he knew of no holier place on oith than the chamber in which the Anglo-Saxon-Idee of veneration for motherhood was renewed and sustained. And then, after he had said once more that he rejoiced, there fell a silence.

Dorothy liked Mr. Miller. Once you got over his remarkable aptitude for sincerities he had an excellent heart. Nevertheless she could not imagine why he had come. She shuddered as he seemed for a moment to be once more on the point of removing his shoes at the door of the Mosque of Motherhood, but apparently he thought better of it. Squaring his shoulders again, and no doubt greatly fortified by his late exercise, he said, "Well, I always feel more of a man after I felt the throb of a fellow-creature's heart. That's so. And now you'll be wondering what's brought me up here? Well, the fact is, Mrs. Tasker, I'm wurried. I got wurries. You can see the wurry-map on my face. Hallowells' is wurrying me. I ain't going to tell you Hallowells' ain't what it was in its pammy days; it may be, or it may not; mebbe you've heard the talk that's going around?"

"No," said Dorothy.

"Is that so? Well, there is talk going around. There's a whole push of people, knocking us all the time. They ain't of much account themselves, but they knock us. It's a power the inferior mind has. And I say I'm wurried about it."

Dorothy, in spite of her "No," had heard of the "knocking" of Hallowell and Smiths', and her heart gave an excited little jump at the thought that flashed across her mind. Did Hallowells' want her back? The firm had been launched upon London with every resource of publicity; Dorothy herself had been the author of its crowning device; and whereas the motto of older firms had been "Courtesy Costs Nothing," Hallowells' had vastly improved upon this. Courtesy had, as a matter of fact, cost them a good deal; but the rewards of the investment had been magnificent. Mr. Miller had known that if you say to people often enough "See how courteous I am," you are to all intents and purposes courteous. But what Mr. Miller had not known had been the precise point at which it is necessary to begin to build up a strained reputation again. Commercial credit too, like those joints Stan carved, comes in in two-pence-halfpennies but goes out in threepences.... And so the "knocking" had begun. Rumours had got about that Hallowells' was a shop where you were asked, after a few unsuitable articles had been shown to you, whether you didn't intend to buy anything, and where you might wait for ten minutes at a counter while two assistants settled a private difference behind it. Did Mr. Miller want her help in restoring the firm's fair name? Did he intend to offer her another contract? Were there to be more of Hallowells' plump, ringing sovereigns—that she would know better how to take care of this time? It was with difficulty that she kept her composure as Mr. Miller continued:

"There's no denying but what inferior minds have that power," he went sorrowfully on. "They can't build up an enterprise, but they can knock, and they been good and busy. You haven't heard of it? Well, that's good as far as it goes, but they been at it for all that. Now I don't want to knock back at your country, Mrs. Tasker, but it seems to me that's the English character. You're hostile to the noo. The noo gives you cold feet. You got a terrific capacity for stopping put. Your King Richard Core de Lion did things in a certain way, and it ain't struck you yet that he's been stiff and straight quite a while. And so when you see something with snap and life to it you start knocking." Mr. Miller spoke almost bitterly. "But I ain't holding you personally responsible, Mrs. Tasker. I reckon you're a wonderful woman. Yours is a reel old family, and if anybody's the right to knock it's you; but you appreciate the noo. You look at it in the light of history. You got the sense of world-progress. You're a sort of Lady Core de Lion to-day. I haven't forgotten the Big Idee you started us off with. And so I come to you, and tell you, straight and fair, we want you."

Dorothy was tingling with excitement; but she took up a piece of sewing—the same piece on which she had bent her modest gaze when she had machinated against her aunt on the afternoon on which Lady Tasker had come on, weary and thirsty, from The Witan. It was a piece she kept for such occasions as these. She stitched demurely, and Mr. Miller went on again:—

"We want you. We want those bright feminine brains of yours, Mrs. Tasker. And your ladies' intooition. We're stuck. We want another Idee like the last. And so we come to the department where we got satisfaction before."

Dorothy spoke slowly. She was glad the pond-room was beautifully furnished—glad, too, that the hours Ruth spent over her "brights" were not spent in vain. The porcelain gleamed in her cabinets and the silver twinkled on her tables. At any rate she did not look poor.

"This is rather a surprise," she said. "I hardly know what to say. I hadn't thought of taking on another contract."

But here Mr. Miller was prompt enough.

"Well, I don't know that we were thinking of a noo contract exactly. You're a lady with a good many responsibilities now, and ain't got too much time for contracts, I guess. No, it ain't a contract. It's an Idee we want."

Far more quickly than Dorothy's hopes had risen they dropped again at this. "An Idee:" naturally!... Everybody wanted that. She had not had to hawk an idea like the last—so simple, so shapely, so beauty-bright. And she had learned that it is not the ideas, but what follows them, that pays—the flat and uninspired routine that forms the everyday work of a lucrative contract. It is the irony of this gipsy life of living by your wits. You do a stately thing and starve; you follow it up—or somebody else does—with faint and empty echoes of that thing, and you are overfed. An Idea—but not a contract; a picking of her brains, but no permanent help against that tide of tradesman's books that flowed in at the front door.... And Dorothy knew already that for another reason Mr. Miller had sought her out in vain. Ideas are not repeated. They visit us, but we cannot fetch them. And as for echoes of that former inspiration of hers, no doubt Mr. Miller had thought of all those for himself and had rejected them.

"I see," she said slowly....

"Well," said Mr. Miller, his worry-map really piteous, "I wish you could tell me where we've gone wrong. It must be something in the British character we ain't appreciated, but what, well, that gets me. We been Imperialistic. There ain't been one of our Monthly House Dinners but what we've had all the Loyal Toasts, one after the other. There ain't been a Royal Wedding but what we've had a special window-display, and christenings the same, and what else you like. We ain't got gay with the Union Jack nor Rotten Row nor the House of Lords. We've reminded folk it was your own King George who said 'Wake up, England——!'"

But at this point Mr. Miller's doleful recital was cut short by a second ring at the bell. Again Ruth's step was heard in the passage outside, and again Ruth, loftily sulky but omitting no point of her duty, stood with the door-knob in her hand.

"Mrs. Pratt," she announced; and Amory entered.

Seeing Mr. Miller, however, she backed again. Mr. Miller had risen and bowed as if he was giving some invisible person a "back" for leapfrog.

"Oh, I do so beg your pardon!" said Amory hurriedly. "I didn't know you'd anybody here. But—if I could speak to you for just a moment, Dorothy—it won't take a minute——"

"Please excuse me," said Dorothy to Mr. Miller; and she went out.

She was back again in less than three minutes. Her face had an unusual pinkness, but her voice was calm. She did not sit down again. Neither did she extend her hand to Mr. Miller in a too abrupt good-bye. Nevertheless, that worried man bowed again, and looked round for his hat and stick.

"I shall have to think over what you've been saying," Dorothy said. "I've no proposal to make off-hand, you see—and I'm rather afraid that just at present I shan't be able to come and see you——"

There were signs in Mr. Miller's bearing of another access of reverence.

"So I'll write. Or better still, if it's not too much trouble for you to come and see me again——? Perhaps I'd better write first.—But you'll have tea, won't you?"

Mr. Miller put up a refusing hand.—"No, I thank you.—So you'll do your possible, Mrs. Tasker? That's vurry good of you. I'm wurried, and I rely on your sharp feminine brains. As for the honorarium, we shan't quarrel about that. I wish I could have shaken hands with Mr. Stan. There ain't a happier and prouder moment in a man's life than——"

"Good-bye."

And the father of three little goils of his own took his leave.

No sooner had he gone than Dorothy's brows contracted. She took three strides across the room and rang for Ruth. Never before had she realized the inferiority, as a means of expressing temper, of an electric bell to a hand-rung one or to one of which a yard or two of wire can be ripped from the wall. Only by mere continuance of pressure till Ruth came did she obtain even a little relief. To the high resolve on Ruth's face she paid no attention whatever.

"A parcel will be coming from Mrs. Pratt," she said. "Please see that it goes back at once."

Ruth's head was heroically high. The late Mr. Mossop had had his faults, but he had not kept his finger on electric-bell buttons till she came.

"No doubt there's them as would give better satisfaction, m'm," she said warningly.

But Dorothy rushed on her fate.—"There seems very little satisfaction anywhere to-day," she answered.

"Then I should wish to give the usual notice," said Ruth.

"Very well," said the reckless mistress.... "Ruth!" (Ruth returned). "You forgot what I said about always shutting the door quietly."

This time the door close so quietly behind Ruth that Dorothy heard her outburst into tears on the other side of it.

Second-hand woollies for her Bits!... Of course Amory Pratt had made the proposal with almost effusive considerateness. No doubt the twins, Corin and Bonniebell, had outgrown them. Dorothy did not suppose for a moment that they were not the best of their kind that money could buy; the Pratts seemed to roll in money. And beyond all dispute the winter might come any morning now, and the garments would just fit Jackie. But—her own Bits!... She had had her back to the bedroom window when the offer had been made; she knew that her sudden flush had not showed; and her voice had not changed as she had deliberately told her lie—that she had bought the children's winter outfits only the day before....

"I'm sure you won't have any difficulty in giving them away," she had concluded as she had passed to the bedroom door.

"Far less difficulty than you'll find here," she might have added, but had forborne....

Other children's woollies for her little Jackie!——

What gave sting to the cut was that Jackie sorely needed them; but then it was not like Amory Pratt, Dorothy thought bitterly, to make a graceful gift of an unrequired thing. She must blunder into people's necessities. A gift of a useless Teddy Bear or of a toy that would be broken in a week Dorothy might not have refused; but mere need!—"Oh!" Dorothy exclaimed, twisting in her chair with anger....

What a day! What a life! And what a little thing thus to epitomize the whole hopeless standstill of their circumstances!

And because it was a little thing, it had a power over Dorothy that twenty greater things would not have had. She was about to call the precious and disparaged Jackie when she thought better of it. Instead, she dropped her face into her hands and melted utterly. What Ruth did in the kitchen she did in the pond-room; and Jackie, who caught the contagion, filled the passage between with an inconsolable howling.

It was into this house of lamentation that Stan entered at half-past four.

"Steady, there!" he called to his younger son; and Jackie's bellow ceased instantaneously.

"Ruth's c'ying, so I c'ied too," he confided solemnly to his father; and the two entered the pond-room together, there to find Dorothy also in tears.

"Hallo, what's this?" said Stan. "Jackie, run and tell Ruth to hurry up with tea.... Head up, Dot—let's have a look at you——"

Perhaps he meant that Dot should have a look at him, for his face shone with an—alas!—not unwonted excitement. Dorothy had seen that shining before. It usually meant that he had been let in on the ground floor of the International Syndicate for the manufacture of pig-spears, or had secured an option on the world's supply of wooden pips for blackberry jam, or an agency for a synthesized champagne. And she never dashed the perennial hopefulness of it. The poor old boy would have been heartbroken had he been allowed to suppose that he was not, in intent at any rate, supporting his wife and children.

"What is it, old girl?" he said. "Just feeling low, eh? Never mind. I've some news for you."

Dorothy summoned what interest she could,—

"Not an agency or anything?" she asked, wiping her eyes.

"Better than that."

"Well, some agencies are very good."

"Not as good as this!"

"Put your arm round me. I've been feeling so wretched!"

"Come and sit here. There. Wretched, eh? Well, would three hundred a year cheer you up any?"

It would have, very considerably; but Stan's schemes were seldom estimated to produce a sum less than that.

"Eh?" Stan continued. "Paid weekly or monthly, whichever I like, and a month's screw to be going on with?"

Suddenly Dorothy straightened herself in his arms. She knew that Stan was trying to rouse her, but he needn't use a joke with quite so sharp a barb. She sank back again.

"Don't, dear," she begged. "I know it's stupid of me, but I'm so dull to-day. You go out somewhere this evening, and I'll go to bed early and sleep it off. I shall be all right again in the morning."

But from the pocket into which she herself had put four half-crowns that very morning—all she could spare—Stan drew out a large handful of silver, with numerous pieces of gold sticking up among it. A glance told her that Stan was not likely to have backed a winner at any such price as that. Other people did, but not Stan. She had turned a little pale.

"Tell me, quick, Stan!" she gasped.

"You laughed rather at the Fortune & Brooks idea, didn't you?"

"Oh, don't joke, darling!——"

"Eh?... I say, you're upset. Anything been happening to-day? Look here, let me get you a drink or something!"

"Do you mean—you've got a job, Stan?"

"Rather!—I say, do let me get you a drink——"

"I shall faint if you don't tell me——"

She probably would....

Stan had got a job. What was it, this job that had enabled Stan to come home, before he had lifted a finger to earn it, with masses of silver in his pocket, and the clean quids sticking up out of the lump like almonds out of a trifle?

—He would have to lift more than a finger before that money was earned. He would have to hang on wires by his toes, and to swim streams, and to be knocked down by runaway horses, and to dash into burning houses, and to fling himself on desperate men, and to ascend into the air in water-planes and to descend in submarines into the deep. Hydrants would be turned on him, and sacks of flour poured on him, and hogsheads of whitewash and bags of soot. Not for his brains, but for his good looks and steady nerves and his hard physical condition had he been the chosen one among many. For Stan had joined a Film Producing Company, less as an actor than as an acrobat. Go and see him this evening. He is as well worth your hour as many a knighted actor. And the scene from "Quentin Durward," in which Bonthron is strung up with the rope round his neck, is not fake. They actually did string Stan up, in the studio near Barnet that had been a Drill Hall, and came precious near to hanging him into the bargain.

But he passed lightly over these and other perils as he poured it all out to Dorothy at tea. Pounds, not perils, were the theme of his song.

"I didn't say anything about it for fear it didn't come off," he said, "but I've been expecting it for weeks." He swallowed tea and cake at a rate that must have put his internal economy to as severe a strain as "Mazeppa" (Historical Film Series, No. XII) afterwards did his bones and muscles. "I start on Monday, so breakfast at eight, sharp, Dot. 'Lola Montez.' They've got a ripping little girl as Lola; took her out to tea and shopping the other day; I'll bring her round." ("No you don't—not with me sitting here like a Jumping Bean," quoth Dorothy). "Oh, that's all right—she's getting married herself next month—furnishing her flat now—I helped her to choose her electric-light fittings—you'd like her.... Ain't it stunning, Dot!——"

It was stunning. Part of the stunningness of it was that Dorothy, with an abrupt "Excuse me a moment," was enabled to cross to her desk and to dash off a note to Harrods. Second-hand woollies for her Bits! Oh no, not if she knew it!... "Yes, go on, dear," she resumed, returning to the tea-table again. "No, I don't wish it was something else. If we're poor we're poor, and the Services are out of the question, and it's just as good as lots of other jobs.—And oh, that reminds me: I had Mr. Miller in this afternoon!"...

"And oh!" said Stan ten minutes later; "I forgot, too! I met a chap, too—forgotten all about it. That fellow I gave a dressing-down about India to up at the Pratts' there. He stopped me in the street, and what do you think? It was all I could do not to laugh. He asked me whether I could put him on to a job! Me, who haven't started myself yet!... I said I could put him on to a drink if that would do—I had to stand somebody a drink, just to wet my luck, and I didn't see another soul—and I fetched it all out of my pocket in a pub in St. Martin's Lane—," he fetched it all out of his pocket again now, "—fetched it out as if it was nothing—you should have seen him look at it!—Strong his name is—didn't catch it that day he was burbling such stuff——"

Dorothy's eyes shone. Dear old Stan! That too pleased her. No doubt the Pratts would be told that Stan was going about so heavily laden with money that he had to divide the weight in order not to walk lopsided——

Worn woollies for His Impudence's Bits!——

Rather not! There would be a parcel round from Harrods' to-morrow!