shilling, although
the donor muttered a malediction on his own folly as he turned away. His
last actions, before reaching his own house in Upper Woburn Place,
were--first to ring the area-bell for a dog that was waiting at another
man's gate (an office which the charitable are often called upon to
perform in the streets of London for dogs and cats alike), and then to
pick up a bony black kitten and take it on his arm to his own door,
where he delivered it to a servant, with injunctions to feed and
comfort the starveling. From which facts it may be seen that Mr. Caspar
Brooke, in spite of all his faults, was a lover of dumb animals, and of
children, and must therefore have possessed a certain amount of
kindliness of disposition.

Mr. Brooke dined at six o'clock, then smoked a cigar and had a cup of
black coffee brought to him in the untidy little sanctum where he
generally did his work. With the coffee came the black kitten, which
sidled up to him on the table, purring, and rubbing her head against his
arm as if she knew him for a friend. He stroked it occasionally as he
read his evening papers, and stroked it in the caressing way which cats
love, from its forehead to the tip of its stumpy tail. It was while he
was thus engaged that a tap at the door was heard, and the tap was
followed by the entrance of a young man, who looked as if he were quite
at home.

"Can I come in?" he said, in a perfunctory sort of way; and then,
without waiting for any reply, went on--"I've no engagement to-night, so
I thought I would look in here first, and see whether you had started."

"All right. Where have you been?"

"Special meeting--Church and State Union," said the young man with a
smile. "I went partly in a medical capacity, partly because I was
curious to know how they managed to unite the two professions."

"Couldn't your sister tell you?"

"Oh, I don't allow Ethel to attend such mixed gatherings," said the
visitor, seating himself on the edge of the library table, and beginning
to play with the cat.

"You are unusually particular," said Mr. Brooke, with an amused look.
But Maurice Kenyon, as the visitor was named, continued to attract the
kitten's notice, without the answering protest which Caspar Brooke had
expected.

Maurice Kenyon was nearly thirty, and had stepped by good fortune into
the shoes of a medical uncle who had left him a large and increasing
general practice in the West Central district. The young man's
po