lamps of a cab, drawn up at the curbing, made two dull orange sparks
under the electric light swinging over the street. A cigarette described
a brief parabola as it was tossed from the brougham, and a short young
man jumped out and entered the gates, then paused and spoke to the
driver of the cab.

"Did you bring Mr. Barrett here?"

"Yes, sir," answered the driver; "him and two other gentlemen."

Lighting another cigarette, from which he drew but two inspirations
before he threw it away, the young man proceeded quickly up the walk.
As he ascended the short flight of steps which led to the main doors,
he panted a little, in a way which suggested that (although his
white waistcoat outlined an ellipse still respectable) a crescendo of
portliness was playing diminuendo with his youth. And, though his
walk was brisk, it was not lively. The expression of his very red face
indicated that his briskness was spurred by anxiety, and a fattish groan
he emitted on the top step added the impression that his comfortable
body protested against the mental spur. In the hall he removed his
narrow-brimmed straw hat and presented a rotund and amiable head,
from the top of which his auburn hair seemed to retire with a sense of
defeat; it fell back, however, not in confusion, but in perfect order,
and the sparse pink mist left upon his crown gave, by a supreme effort,
an effect of arrangement, so that an imaginative observer would have
declared that there was a part down the middle. The gentleman's plump
face bore a grave and troubled expression, and gravity and trouble were
patent in all the lines of his figure and in every gesture; in the way
he turned his head; in the uneasy shifting of his hat from one hand to
the other and in his fanning himself with it in a nervous fashion;
and in his small, blue eyes, which did not twinkle behind his rimless
glasses and looked unused to not twinkling. His gravity clothed him
like an ill-fitting coat; or, possibly, he might have reminded the
imaginative observer, just now conjured up, of a music-box set to
turning its cylinder backwards.

He spoke to an attendant, and was directed to an office, which he
entered without delay. There were five men in the room, three of them
engaged in conversation near the door; another, a young surgeon, was
writing at a desk; the fifth drowsily nodding on a sofa. The newcomer
bowed as he entered.

"Mr. Barrett?" he said inquiringly.

One of the men near the door t