ed Devonshire
House. It would be the merest chance that she should be at her Club.
But he dawdled down Bond Street with a beating heart, noticing the
superiority of all other young men to himself. They wore their clothes
with such an air; they had assurance; they were old. He was suddenly
overwhelmed by the conviction that Fleur must have forgotten him.
Absorbed in his own feeling for her all these weeks, he had mislaid that
possibility. The corners of his mouth drooped, his hands felt clammy.
Fleur with the pick of youth at the beck of her smile-Fleur incomparable!
It was an evil moment. Jon, however, had a great idea that one must be
able to face anything. And he braced himself with that dour refection in
front of a bric-a-brac shop. At this high-water mark of what was once
the London season, there was nothing to mark it out from any other except
a grey top hat or two, and the sun. Jon moved on, and turning the corner
into Piccadilly, ran into Val Dartie moving toward the Iseeum Club, to
which he had just been elected.

"Hallo! young man! Where are you off to?"

Jon gushed. "I've just been to my tailor's."

Val looked him up and down. "That's good! I'm going in here to order
some cigarettes; then come and have some lunch."

Jon thanked him. He might get news of her from Val!

The condition of England, that nightmare of its Press and Public men, was
seen in different perspective within the tobacconist's which they now
entered.

"Yes, sir; precisely the cigarette I used to supply your father with.
Bless me! Mr. Montague Dartie was a customer here from--let me see--the
year Melton won the Derby. One of my very best customers he was." A
faint smile illumined the tobacconist's face. "Many's the tip he's given
me, to be sure! I suppose he took a couple of hundred of these every
week, year in, year out, and never changed his cigarette. Very affable
gentleman, brought me a lot of custom. I was sorry he met with that
accident. One misses an old customer like him."

Val smiled. His father's decease had closed an account which had been
running longer, probably, than any other; and in a ring of smoke puffed
out from that time-honoured cigarette he seemed to see again his father's
face, dark, good-looking, moustachioed, a little puffy, in the only halo
it had earned. His father had his fame here, anyway--a man who smoked
two hundred cigarettes a week, who could give tips, and run accounts for
ever! T