go on as keenly as before, but they would hunt in
different company, that was all. Yes, that was all. . . .

Cicely found the effect of her cigarette less sedative than she was
disposed to exact. It might be necessary to change the brand. Some ten
or eleven days later Yeovil read an announcement in the papers that, in
spite of handsome offers of increased salary, Mr. Tony Luton, the
original singer of the popular ditty "Eccleston Square," had terminated
his engagement with Messrs. Isaac Grosvenor and Leon Hebhardt of the
Caravansery Theatre, and signed on as a deck hand in the Canadian Marine.

Perhaps after all there had been some shred of glory amid the trumpet
triumph of that July afternoon.

CHAPTER XV: THE INTELLIGENT ANTICIPATOR OF WANTS

Two of Yeovil's London clubs, the two that he had been accustomed to
frequent, had closed their doors after the catastrophe. One of them had
perished from off the face of the earth, its fittings had been sold and
its papers lay stored in some solicitor's office, a tit-bit of material
for the pen of some future historian. The other had transplanted itself
to Delhi, whither it had removed its early Georgian furniture and its
traditions, and sought to reproduce its St. James's Street atmosphere as
nearly as the conditions of a tropical Asiatic city would permit. There
remained the Cartwheel, a considerably newer institution, which had
sprung into existence somewhere about the time of Yeovil's last sojourn
in England; he had joined it on the solicitation of a friend who was
interested in the venture, and his bankers had paid his subscription
during his absence. As he had never been inside its doors there could be
no depressing comparisons to make between its present state and aforetime
glories, and Yeovil turned into its portals one afternoon with the
adventurous detachment of a man who breaks new ground and challenges new
experiences.

He entered with a diffident sense of intrusion, conscious that his
standing as a member might not be recognised by the keepers of the doors;
in a moment, however, he realised that a rajah's escort of elephants
might almost have marched through the entrance hall and vestibule without
challenge. The general atmosphere of the scene suggested a blend of the
railway station at Cologne, the Hotel Bristol in any European capital,
and the second act in most musical comedies. A score of brilliant and
brilliantined pages decorated the foreg