ero, more and more did it
seem desirable to have a big talk with Billy and place everything that
had got disturbed. Benham thought of going to Cambridge for a week of
exhaustive evenings. Small engagements delayed that expedition....

Then came a day in April when all the world seemed wrong to Benham. He
was irritable; his will was unstable; whatever presented itself to be
done presented itself as undesirable; he could settle to nothing. He had
been keeping away from Mrs. Skelmersdale and in the morning there came a
little note from her designed to correct this abstention. She understood
the art of the attractive note. But he would not decide to go to her. He
left the note unanswered.

Then came his mother at the telephone and it became instantly certain to
Benham that he could not play the dutiful son that evening. He answered
her that he could not come to dinner. He had engaged himself. "Where?"

"With some men."

There was a pause and then his mother's voice came, flattened by
disappointment. "Very well then, little Poff. Perhaps I shall see you
to-morrow."

He replaced the receiver and fretted back into his study, where the
notes on aristocracy lay upon his desk, the notes he had been pretending
to work over all the morning.

"Damned liar!" he said, and then, "Dirty liar!" He decided to lunch at
the club, and in the afternoon he was moved to telephone an appointment
with his siren. And having done that he was bound to keep it.

About one o'clock in the morning he found himself walking back to
Finacue Street. He was no longer a fretful conflict of nerves, but if
anything he was less happy than he had been before. It seemed to him
that London was a desolate and inglorious growth.

London ten years ago was much less nocturnal than it is now. And not so
brightly lit. Down the long streets came no traffic but an occasional
hansom. Here and there a cat halted or bolted in the road. Near
Piccadilly a policeman hovered artfully in a doorway, and then came a
few belated prostitutes waylaying the passers-by, and a few youths and
men, wearily lust driven.

As he turned up New Bond Street he saw a figure that struck him
as familiar. Surely!--it was Billy Prothero! Or at any rate it was
astonishingly like Billy Prothero. He glanced again and the likeness
was more doubtful. The man had his back to Benham, he was halting and
looking back at a woman.

By some queer flash of intuition it came to Benham that even if this