nd kissed her when they
parted for the night. Then he came down to his little room, and sat
for a time at his desk, piled with books and works of reference. He
brooded gloomily for several moments over what Rachael had been
saying. A knock at the door made him start. It was only a servant,
come to see to the fire, but his hand had darted out toward a certain
drawer of his desk. When the servant had retired, he opened it for a
minute and looked in. A small shining revolver lay there, and a box of
cartridges.

"Your idea, my friend Rochester!" he muttered to himself.

CHAPTER XXX

A SURPRISING REQUEST

The Duchess of Ampthill was giving a great dinner-party at her house
in Grosvenor Square. She had found several new prodigies, and one of
them was performing in a most satisfactory manner. He sat at her left
hand, and though, unlike Saton, he had at first been shy, the
continual encouragement of his hostess had eventually produced the
desired result. His name was Chalmers, and he was the nephew of a
bishop. He had taken a double first at Oxford, and now announced his
intention of embracing literature as a profession. He wore glasses,
and he was still very young.

"There is no doubt at all," he said, in answer to a remark from the
Duchess, "that London has reached just that stage in her development
as a city of human beings, which was so fatal to some of her
predecessors in pre-eminence, some of those ancient cities of which
there exists to-day only the name. The blood in her arteries is no
longer robust. Already the signs of decay are plentiful."

"I wonder," Rochester inquired, "what you consider your evidences
are for such a statement. To a poor outsider like myself, for
instance, London seems to have all the outward signs of an amazingly
prosperous--one might almost say a splendidly progressive city."

Chalmers smiled. It was a smile he had cultivated when contradicted at
the Union, and he knew its weight.

"From a similar point of view," he said, "as yours, Mr. Rochester,
Rome and Athens, Nineveh, and those more ancient cities, presented the
same appearance of prosperity. Yet if you ask for signs, there are
surely many to be seen. I am anxious," he continued, gazing around him
with an air of bland enjoyment, "to avoid anything in the nature of an
epigram. There is nothing so unconvincing, so stultifying to one's
statements, as to express them epigrammatically. People at once give
you credit for an att