ner foyer and restaurant. At the foot of the stairs he looked about
for a quiet corner. The luncheon hour was almost ended. Groups of
smokers and coffee drinkers were scattered throughout the larger room,
which widened out below a second short flight of carpeted steps. The
smaller anteroom in which he stood was empty, save for a few people
passing that way from the restaurant, and he decided that a nook near
a palm shaded balcony offered the retreat he sought.

He little dreamed that he was choosing the starting point of the most
thrilling adventure in a life already adventurous; that the soft
carpet of the Embankment Hotel might waft him to scenes not within the
common scope. That is ever the way of true romance. Your knight errant
may wander in the forest for a day or a year,--he never knows the
moment when the enchanted glade shall open before his eyes; nay, he
scarce has seen the weeping maiden bound to a tree ere he is called in
to couch his lance and ride a-tilt at the fire breathing dragon. It
was so when men and maids dwelt in a young world; it is so now; and it
will be so till the crack of doom. Manners may change, and costume;
but hearts filled with the wine of life are not to be altered. They
are fashioned that way, and the world does not vary, else Eve might
regain Paradise, and all the fret and fume have an end.

Charles K. Spencer, then, would certainly have been the most
astonished, though perhaps the most self possessed, man in London had
some guardian sprite whispered low in his ear what strange hazard lay
in his choice of a chair. If such whisper were vouchsafed to him he
paid no heed. Perhaps his occupancy of that particular corner was
preordained. It was inviting, secluded, an upholstered backwash in the
stream of fashion; so he sat there, nearly stunned a waiter by asking
for a glass of water, and composed himself to read his letters.

The waiter hesitated. He was a Frenchman, and feared he had not heard
aright.

"What sort of water, sir," he asked,--"Vichy, St. Galmier,
Apollinaris?"

Spencer looked up. He thought the man had gone. "No, none of those,"
he said. "Just plain, unemotional water,--_eau naturelle_,--straight
from the pipe,--the microbe laden fluid that runs off London tiles
most days. I haven't been outside the hotel during the last hour; but
if you happen to pass the door I guess you'll see the kind of essence
I mean dripping off umbrellas. If you don't keep it in the house, try