y similar places. His salary of a thousand a year (to
which was to be added a handsome, if varying commission) enabled him to
pick and choose; the house which he did choose, in the immediate
neighbourhood of Lancaster Gate, was of the luxurious order; its private
rooms were models of the last thing in comfort, its public rooms were
equal to those of the best modern hotels. If you wanted male society, you
could find it in the smoking-room and the billiard-room; if you desired
feminine influences there was a pleasing variety in the drawing-room and
the lounges. You could be just as much alone, and just as much in company
as you pleased--anyway, the place suited Ambler Appleyard, and there he
had lived for two and a half years. And during a good two of them, the
young lady whom he knew as Miss Slade had lived there too.

With Miss Slade, Appleyard, as fellow-resident in the same house, was on
quite friendly terms. He sometimes talked to her in one of the
drawing-rooms. He knew her for a clever, rather brilliant young woman,
with ideas, and the power to express them. It was evident to him that she
had travelled and had seen a good deal of the world and its men and
women; she could talk politics with far more knowledge and insight than
most women; she knew more than a little of economic matters, and was
inclined, like Appleyard himself, to utilitarianism in all things
affecting government and society. But of herself she never spoke
directly; all Appleyard knew of her concerns was that she was engaged in
business of some nature, and went to it every morning as regularly and
punctually as he went to his. He judged that whatever her business was
she must be well paid for it, or must possess means of her own; nobody,
man or woman, could possibly live at that boarding-house, or private
hotel, as its proprietors preferred to call it, for anything less than
four guineas a week. Well--here was the explanation of Miss Slade's
business; she was evidently private secretary to Mr. Franklin Fullaway,
and competent to do business at a place like Rothschild's. And why
not?--yet ... why did she call herself Miss Slade at the boarding-house
and Mrs. Marlow in her business capacity?

"And yet why shouldn't she?" asked Appleyard of himself. "A woman's a
right to do what she likes in that way, and she isn't necessarily
deceitful because she passes as a single woman in one place and a widow
in another. I daresay she could give a very good reason