red, turning to the clergyman.

"Twenty-one; see, it's on the door."

Bindle looked; there was "21" clear enough.

"Wot's yer number, sir?" he asked the Frenchman.

"Vingt-quatre."

"Now don't you go a-using none of them words 'fore a clergyman. Wot's
yer number? that's wot I'm arstin'."

"Twenty-four--vingt-quatre."

"Well," said Bindle with decision, "you're in the wrong room."

"Mais c'est impossible," cried the Frenchman. "We have been here all
night. Is it not so, cherie?" He turned to his wife for corroboration.

Bindle had no time to enter further into the dispute. Suddenly a fresh
disturbance broke out further along the corridor.

"What the devil do you mean by this outrage, sir?" an angry and
imperious voice was demanding. "What the devil do you----"

With a hasty word to the clergyman, who now looked thoroughly ashamed
of himself, and a gentle push in the direction of the Office of Works,
Bindle trotted off to the scene of the new disturbance. He heard
another suppressed scream from the pink neglige betokening the entry of
the clergyman.

"What the devil do you mean by entering my room?"

A tall, irate man, with the Army stamped all over him, dressed in
pyjamas, with a monocle firmly wedged in his left eye, was fiercely
eyeing a smaller man in a bath-robe.

"Not content with having got into my room, but damme, sir, you must
needs try and get into my trousers. What the devil do you mean by it?"

Bindle looked along the corridor appreciatively. "Looks like a
shipwreck at night, it do," he remarked to the chambermaid.

"It's my room," said the man in the bathrobe.

"Confound you," was the reply, "this is my room, and I'll prosecute you
for libel."

"My room is No. 18," responded the other, "and I left my wife there
half an hour ago."

He pointed to the figures on the door in proof of his contention. The
man in the monocle looked at the door, and a puzzled expression passed
over his face.

"Damme," he exploded, "my room is No. 15, but I certainly slept in that
room all night." He darted inside and reappeared a moment after with
his trousers in his hand.

"Here are my trousers to prove it. Are these your trousers?" The man
in the bath-robe confessed that they were not.

"That seems to prove it all right, sir," remarked Bindle, who had come
up. "A man don't sleep in a different room from his trousers,
leastways, unless 'e's a 'Ighlander."

Similar disturbances were taking