llowed by a stagnant lull which had lasted
for days and had only been disturbed by the trifling incident of
a gentleman in the Jewish quarter of the town setting fire to a
neighbour's bazaar, in the very natural endeavour to find a French
half-penny which he had chanced to drop among a bale of carpets while
looking in to drive a soft bargain. As Mrs. Greyne wired to Algiers,
such incidents were of no value to "Catherine."

A very active interchange of views had gone on between the husband and
wife as time went by, and the book was at a standstill. At first Mrs.
Greyne contented herself with daily letters, but latterly she had
resorted to wires, explanatory, condemnatory, hortatory, and even
comminatory. She began bitterly to regret her husband's well-proven
innocence, and wished she had despatched an uncle of hers by marriage,
an ex-captain in the Royal Navy, who, she began to feel certain, would
have been able to find far more frailty in Algiers than poor Eustace, in
his simplicity, would ever come at. She even began to wish that she had
crossed the sea in person, and herself boldly set about the ingathering
of the material for which she was so impatiently waiting.

Her uneasiness was brought to a head by a letter from a house agent,
stating that the corner mansion in Park Lane next to the Duke of
Ebury's was being nibbled at by a Venezuelan millionaire. She wired this
terrible fact at once to Africa, adding, at an enormous expenditure of
cash:

This will never do. You are too innocent, and cannot see
what lies before you. Obtain assistance. Go to the British
consul.

Mr. Greyne at once cabled back:

Am following your advice. Will wire result. Regret my
innocence, but am distressed that you should so utterly
condemn it.

Upon receiving this telegram at night, before a lonely dinner, Mrs.
Eustace Greyne was deeply moved. She felt she had been hasty. She knew
that to very few women was it given to have a husband so free from
all masculine infirmities as Mr. Greyne. At the same time there was
"Catherine," there was the mansion in Park Lane, there was the Venezuelan
millionaire. She began to feel distracted, and, for the first time in
her life, refused to partake of sweetbreads fried in mushroom ketchup,
a dish which she had greatly affected from the time when she wrote her
first short story. While she was in the very act of waving away this
delicacy a footman came in with a foreign te