e that ourself, when a boy. But
let him have his own way. These streets shall be unmitigated Town now,
to please him, in spite of the walks Dr. Johnson had in Marylebone
Fields. To be sure, Marylebone Fields soon became Gardens then-abouts,
like Ranelagh, and you drove along Harley Street to a musical
entertainment there, with music by Pergolesi and Galuppi.

The time of this story is post-Johnsonian, but it is older than its
readers; unless, indeed, a chance oldster now and then opens it to see
if it is a proper book to have in the house. The world in the early
fifties was very unlike what it is in the present century, and _that_
isn't yet in its teens. It was also very unlike what it had been in the
days when the family mansion in Cavendish Square, that had not had a
family in it then for forty years, was as good as new. It was so, no
doubt, for a good while after George the Third ceased to be King,
because the thorough griming it has had since had hardly begun, and
fields were sweet at Paddington, and the Regent could be bacchanalian in
that big drawing-room on the first floor without any consciousness that
he had a Park in the neighbourhood. Oh dear--how near the country
Cavendish Square was in those days!

By the time Queen Victoria was on the throne the grime had set in in
earnest, and was hard at work long before the fifty-one Exhibition
reported progress--progress in bedevilment, says the Pessimist? Never
mind him! Let him sulk in a corner while the Optimist dwells on the
marvellous developments of which fifty-one was only symptomatic--the
quick-firing guns and smokeless powder; the mighty ships, a dozen of
them big enough to take all the Athenians of the days of Pericles to the
bottom at once; the machines that turn out books so cheap that their
contents may be forgotten in six months, and no one be a penny the
worse; the millionaires who have so much money they can't spend
it--heaps and heaps of wonders up-to-date that no one ever feels
surprised at nowadays. The Optimist will tell you all about them. For
the moment, let's pretend that none of them have come to pass, and get
back to Cavendish Square at the date of the story, and the suite of
rooms on the second floor that had been Sister Nora's town anchorage
when she first made Dave Wardle's acquaintance as an unconscious
Hospital patient, and that had been renovated since her father's death
to serve as a _pied-a-terre_ until she could be sure of her arrange