stice. It isn't as if I was one of them conscripts."

"No," murmured Mr. Prohack thoughtfully; then brightening: "And as soon
as you were discharged you went back to your old job?"

"I did and I didn't, sir. The fact is, I've been driving an ambulance
for the City of London, but as soon as I heard of something private I
chucked that. I can't say as I like these Corporations. There's a bit
too much stone wall about them Corporations, for my taste."

"Family man?" asked Mr. Prohack lightly. "I've two children myself and
both of them can drive."

"Really, sir, I am a family man, as ye might say, but my wife and me,
we're best apart."

"Sorry to hear that. I didn't want to--"

"Oh, not at all, sir! That's all right. But you see--the war--me being
away and all that--I've got the little boy. He's nine."

"Well," said Mr. Prohack, jumping up nervously, "suppose we go and have
a look at the car, shall we?"

"Certainly, sir," said Carthew, throwing the end of his cigarette into
the fender, and hastening.

"My dove," said Mr. Prohack to his wife in the hall. "I congratulate you
on your taste in chauffeurs. Carthew and I have laid the foundations of
a lasting friendship."

"I really wonder you asked him to smoke in the drawing-room," Mrs.
Prohack critically observed.

"Why? He saved England for me; and now I'm trusting my life to him."

"I do believe you'd _like_ there to be a revolution in this country."

"Not at all, angel! And I don't think there'll be one. But I'm taking my
precautions in case there should be one."

"He's only a chauffeur."

"That's very true. He was doing some useful work, driving an ambulance
to hospitals. But we've stopped that. He's now only a chauffeur to the
idle rich."

"Oh, Arthur! I wish you wouldn't try to be funny on such subjects. You
know you don't mean it."

Mrs. Prohack was now genuinely reproachful, and the first conjugal
joy-ride might have suffered from a certain constraint had it taken
place. It did not, however, take place. Just as Carthew was holding out
the rug (which Eve's prodigious thoroughness had remembered to buy)
preparatory to placing it on the knees of his employers, a truly
gigantic automobile drove up to the door, its long bonnet stopping
within six inches of the Eagle's tail-lantern. The Eagle looked like
nothing at all beside it. Mr. Prohack knew that leviathan. He had many
times seen it in front of the portals of his principal club. It was the
car of hi