mpanied by their wives or sweethearts,
whose little high-heeled shoes made a sharp tap-a-tap against the
pavement. Lamps were lighted. The reluctant twilight was gradually
fading; the sunset still glowed faintly above clustered chimney-pots to
the west. "I'm going to meet Terry," he told himself. "If the day had
worked out as I'd planned, I should be going to ask for her hand in
marriage---- When I planned that, I still believed that I was young."

Then he thought forward. Sir Tobias, from the moment he entered, would
be scheming to get him to himself. Sir Tobias must be avoided. Directly
dinner was ended, he would try to hurry him off and imprison him in his
library to discuss this Maisie woman and Adair. Still he was going to
see Terry; merely to see her was a compensation which stirred his blood.

He crossed the Serpentine, stretching like a phantom lake, rose and
slate-colored, through the Peter Pan haunted glades of Kensington
Gardens. Then he emerged from the Victoria Gate and found himself
ringing a bell and being admitted by a butler, who relieved him of his
coat and hat with the velvet-plush manner of a fashionable surgeon
feeling a patient's pulse.

"If you will come this way, Sir Tobias is waiting for your Lordship in
the library."

It was happening precisely as he had foreseen; it was being taken for
granted that he had come as her father's friend, and therefore in some
absurd measure as his contemporary.

As he prepared to follow, his attention was attracted by the scarlet
band and gold braid about an officer's cap which was lying carelessly on
the hall-table beside a pair of dog-skin gloves.

V

Sir Tobias was standing astride the hearth-rug with his back towards the
fire. As the door opened, he was caught in a last nervous adjustment of
his tie.

He was a little man, inclined to be podgy, brimful of a darting kind of
energy and dignified with an air of fussy distinction which none of his
antics, however grotesque, could diminish. He was Shakespeare as he
might have appeared at sixty, after years and a return to Ann Hathaway
had quenched the taller flames of his poetic fire. The resemblance was
haunting and remarkable: there underlay it a hint of gnome-like agility.
One suspected that he affected age as a disguise. The pointed beard was
white; the scanty hair had receded from the calm forehead; the eyes were
blue and faded, and red about the rims with over-much study. The top
part of the face a