y. Imagine a
woman, uninvited and unpermitted, arranging his collar and necktie for
him in the largest public room of the Grand Babylon, and then talking
about his little moles! It would have been unimaginable! Yet it
happened. And moreover, he had not disliked it. She sat back in her
chair as though she had done nothing in the least degree unusual.

"I can see you must have been very upset," she said gently, "though he
_has_ only left you a pound a week. Still, that's better than a bat in
the eye with a burnt stick."

A bat in the eye with a burnt stick reminded him vaguely of encounters
with the police; otherwise it conveyed no meaning to his mind.

"I hope you haven't got to go on duty at once," she said after a pause.
"Because you really do look as if you needed a rest, and a cup of tea or
something of that, I'm quite ashamed to have come bothering you so
soon."

"Duty?" he questioned. "What duty?"

"Why," she exclaimed, "haven't you got a new place?"

"New place!" he repeated after. "What do you mean?"

"Why, as valet."

There was certainly danger in his tendency to forget that he was a
valet. He collected himself.

"No," he said, "I haven't got a new place."

"Then why are you staying here?" she cried. "I thought you were simply
here with a new master, Why are you staying here alone?"

"Oh," he replied, abashed, "it seemed a convenient place. It was just by
chance that I came here."

"Convenient place indeed!" she said stoutly. "I never heard of such a
thing!"

He perceived that he had shocked her, pained her. He saw that some
ingenious defence of himself was required; but he could find none. So he
said, in his confusion--

"Suppose we go and have something to eat? I do want a bit of lunch, as
you say, now I come to think of it. Will you?"

"What? Here?" she demanded apprehensively.

"Yes," he said. "Why not?"

"Well--!"

"Come along!" he said, with fine casualness, and conducted her to the
eight swinging glass doors that led to the _salle a manger_ of the Grand
Babylon. At each pair of doors was a living statue of dignity in cloth
of gold. She passed these statues without a sign of fear, but when she
saw the room itself, steeped in a supra-genteel calm, full of gowns and
hats and everything that you read about in the _Lady's Pictorial,_ and
the pennoned mast of a barge crossing the windows at the other end, she
stopped suddenly. And one of the lord mayors of the Grand Babylon,
wearing a m