not. I have understood, by taking
careful notice; and, by heaven, so shall the others. This shall not be
blown upon. He shall finish his experiment. He shall have L800 a year
from somewhere till he has stopped dancing. To stop him now is an
infamous war on a great idea. It is religious persecution."

Mr Bingham held out his hand cordially.

"I thank you, Mr Grant," he said. "I hope I shall be able to answer for
the source of the L800 and I fancy that I shall. Will you come in my
cab?"

"No, thank you very much, Mr Bingham," said Grant heartily. "I think I
will go and have a chat with the professor in the garden."

The conversation between Chadd and Grant appeared to be personal and
friendly. They were still dancing when I left.

Chapter 6. The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady

The conversation of Rupert Grant had two great elements of
interest--first, the long fantasias of detective deduction in which he
was engaged, and, second, his genuine romantic interest in the life of
London. His brother Basil said of him: "His reasoning is particularly
cold and clear, and invariably leads him wrong. But his poetry comes
in abruptly and leads him right." Whether this was true of Rupert as a
whole, or no, it was certainly curiously supported by one story about
him which I think worth telling.

We were walking along a lonely terrace in Brompton together. The street
was full of that bright blue twilight which comes about half past eight
in summer, and which seems for the moment to be not so much a coming of
darkness as the turning on of a new azure illuminator, as if the earth
were lit suddenly by a sapphire sun. In the cool blue the lemon tint of
the lamps had already begun to flame, and as Rupert and I passed them,
Rupert talking excitedly, one after another the pale sparks sprang out
of the dusk. Rupert was talking excitedly because he was trying to
prove to me the nine hundred and ninety-ninth of his amateur detective
theories. He would go about London, with this mad logic in his brain,
seeing a conspiracy in a cab accident, and a special providence in a
falling fusee. His suspicions at the moment were fixed upon an unhappy
milkman who walked in front of us. So arresting were the incidents which
afterwards overtook us that I am really afraid that I have forgotten
what were the main outlines of the milkman's crime. I think it had
something to do with the fact that he had only one small can of milk to
carry, and tha