the furniture of the hall, the air of refinement in the room he
entered. At present he smiled on everything. Could he not command the
same as soon as he chose?

Mr. Westlake rose from his writing-table and greeted his visitor with a
hearty grip of the hand. He was a man pleasant to look upon; his face,
full of intellect, shone with the light of good-will, and the easy
carelessness of his attire prepared one for the genial sincerity which
marked his way of speaking. He wore a velvet jacket, a grey waistcoat
buttoning up to the throat, grey trousers, fur-bordered slippers; his
collar was very deep, and instead of the ordinary shirt-cuffs, his
wrists were enclosed in frills. Long-haired, full-bearded, he had
the forehead of an idealist and eyes whose natural expression was an
indulgent smile.

A man of letters, he had struggled from obscure poverty to success and
ample means; at three-and-thirty he was still hard pressed to make both
ends meet, but the ten subsequent years had built for him this pleasant
home and banished his long familiar anxieties to the land of nightmare.
'It came just in time,' he was in the habit of saying to those who had
his confidence. 'I was at the point where a man begins to turn sour, and
I should have soured in earnest.' The process had been most effectually
arrested. People were occasionally found to say that his books had a
tang of acerbity; possibly this was the safety-valve at work, a hint of
what might have come had the old hunger-demons kept up their goading. In
the man himself you discovered an extreme simplicity of feeling, a
frank tenderness, a noble indignation. For one who knew him it was not
difficult to understand that he should have taken up extreme social
views, still less that he should act upon his convictions. All his
writing foretold such a possibility, though on the other hand it
exhibited devotion to forms of culture which do not as a rule predispose
to democratic agitation. The explanation was perhaps too simple to be
readily hit upon; the man was himself so supremely happy that with his
disposition the thought of tyrannous injustice grew intolerable to him.
Some incidents happened to set his wrath blazing, and henceforth, in
spite of not a little popular ridicule and much shaking of the head
among his friends, Mr. Westlake had his mission.

'I have come to ask your advice and help,' began Mutimer with
directness. He was conscious of the necessity of subduing his voice,