master, who, though he taught modern subjects, employed
old-fashioned methods in driving his lessons home. It was this enforced
familiarity with an important commercial language which thrust Abbleway
in later years into strange lands where adventures were less easy to
guard against than in the ordered atmosphere of an English country town.
The firm that he worked for saw fit to send him one day on a prosaic
business errand to the far city of Vienna, and, having sent him there,
continued to keep him there, still engaged in humdrum affairs of
commerce, but with the possibilities of romance and adventure, or even
misadventure, jostling at his elbow. After two and a half years of
exile, however, John James Abbleway had embarked on only one hazardous
undertaking, and that was of a nature which would assuredly have
overtaken him sooner or later if he had been leading a sheltered, stay-at-
home existence at Dorking or Huntingdon. He fell placidly in love with a
placidly lovable English girl, the sister of one of his commercial
colleagues, who was improving her mind by a short trip to foreign parts,
and in due course he was formally accepted as the young man she was
engaged to. The further step by which she was to become Mrs. John
Abbleway was to take place a twelvemonth hence in a town in the English
midlands, by which time the firm that employed John James would have no
further need for his presence in the Austrian capital.

It was early in April, two months after the installation of Abbleway as
the young man Miss Penning was engaged to, when he received a letter from
her, written from Venice. She was still peregrinating under the wing of
her brother, and as the latter's business arrangements would take him
across to Fiume for a day or two, she had conceived the idea that it
would be rather jolly if John could obtain leave of absence and run down
to the Adriatic coast to meet them. She had looked up the route on the
map, and the journey did not appear likely to be expensive. Between the
lines of her communication there lay a hint that if he really cared for
her--

Abbleway obtained leave of absence and added a journey to Fiume to his
life's adventures. He left Vienna on a cold, cheerless day. The flower
shops were full of spring blooms, and the weekly organs of illustrated
humour were full of spring topics, but the skies were heavy with clouds
that looked like cotton-wool that has been kept over long in a shop
wind