"
without having my suspicions aroused. Who and what is this man? thought I.
I looked at him narrowly. At first the thought flashed across me that he
might be a "swell mobsman." But no, his face was too good for that;
besides, no man with that huge frame, that personality so marked and so
easily recognizable, could be a swindler; he could not escape detection a
single hour. I dismissed the ungenerous thought. Perhaps he is rich, as he
says. We do hear of munificent donations by benevolent millionaires now
and then. What if this Australian, attracted by the glories of the old
cathedral, should now appear as a _deus ex machina_ to reendow the choir,
or to found a musical professoriate in connection with the choir,
appointing me the first occupant of the professorial chair?

These thoughts flashed across my mind in the momentary pause of his fluent
tongue.

"As for yourself, sir," he began again, "I have something to propose which
I trust may not prove unwelcome. But the public street is hardly a
suitable place to discuss my proposal. May I call upon you this evening at
your house in the close? I know which it is, for I happened to see you go
into it yesterday after the morning service."

"I shall be very pleased to see you," I replied. "We are going out to
dinner this evening, but I shall be at home and disengaged till about
seven."

"Thank you very much. Then I shall do myself the pleasure of calling upon
you about six o'clock. Till then, farewell!" A graceful wave of the hand,
and my unknown friend had disappeared round the corner of the street.

Now at last, I thought, something is going to happen in my uneventful
life--something to break the monotony of existence. Of course, he must
have inquired my name--he could get that from any of the cathedral
vergers--and, as he said, he had observed whereabouts in the close I
lived. What is he coming to see me for? I wondered. I spent the rest of
the afternoon in making the wildest surmises. I was castle-building in
Spain at a furious rate. At one time I imagined that this faithful son of
the church--as he appeared to me--was going to build and endow a grand
cathedral in Australia on condition that I should be appointed dean at a
yearly stipend of, say, ten thousand pounds. Or perhaps, I said to myself,
he will beg me to accept a sum of money--I never thought of it as less
than a thousand pounds--as a slight recognition of and tribute to my
remarkable vocal ability.

I t