ll-managed business is a business which runs smoothly
and efficiently when the manager is not managing, and to that other
maxim that the highest aim of the competent manager should be to make
himself unnecessary. Hence he was perfectly at liberty to be wayward and
freakish in his activities from time to time. And this happened to be
one of his wayward and freakish mornings. There were, however, few
young women in the common room to behold his aberration, for the hour
was within two minutes of nine, and at nine o'clock the latest of the
legionaries was supposed to be at her post. Three girls who were being
hastily served with glasses of milk by a pink-aproned waitress politely
feigned not to see him. Then another girl ran in, and she, too, had to
pretend that the spectacle of Hugo pasting posters on mirrors was one of
the most ordinary in life. Hugo glanced at this last comer in the
mirror, and sighed a secret disappointment.

The interview with Louis Ravengar had left him less perturbed than might
be imagined--at any rate, as regards Ravengar's own share in what had
occurred and what was to occur. He was inclined to leave Ravengar out of
the account, and to put the greater part of his hysterical appeals and
threats down to the effect of a sleepless and highly unusual night. That
Ravengar was absolutely sincere in his desire to marry Camilla he did
not doubt, and he fully shared the frenzied man's determination that
Camilla should not marry Francis Tudor. But beyond this Hugo did not go.
He certainly did not go so far as to believe that Camilla had ever
formally engaged herself to Ravengar. He thought it just possible that
Ravengar might have committed a crime, or several crimes, and that
Camilla might have knowledge of them, but the question whether Ravengar
was or was not a criminal appeared to him to be a little off the point.

The unique point was his own prospects with Camilla. It may be said that
he felt capable of shielding her from forty Ravengars.

He had torn prudence to shreds, and stamped on it, that morning, and had
gone down boldly and directly to Department 42 at a quarter to nine, in
order to meet Camilla. And she had not then arrived. He had then
conceived the idea of, and the excuse for, a visit to the common room,
through which every assistant was obliged to pass on her way to the
receipt of custom. In the whole history of Hugo's a poster had never
before been known to be posted on a mirror, which is