She was looking at the imprint of the feet. Next he heard her patting the damp arm-chair, and exclaiming that she never! The strain upon George Mulross Demaine was increasing, but had it been tenfold as severe he dared not descend. A slight involuntary movement due to an effort to ease his shoulder off a point of brick produced a fall of soot which most unpleasantly covered his face. He could hear a startled exclamation from the wench, her decision that she didn’t understand the house at all, and her sudden exit. Hardly had she shut the garden door behind her when a key was heard turning in the lock in the other door opening into the house, and the Expected Stranger, the Unknown Host, entered. The moment of George’s salvation was at hand. Two very large flat boots slowly tramped into the narrow region he could survey: above each nine inches of creased grey trouser leg could be seen; the boots, the trouser legs, did not approach the arm-chair; they took little notice apparently of things about them. Their owner grunted his satisfaction that none of his papers had been removed by the maid to whom he applied a most indiscreet epithet; he grunted further satisfaction that she had laid his fire and not lit it. Apparently it was among his other eccentricities to have a fire upon a June morning simply because the room was cold, and to let it die down before noon. The Unknown came close to the grate. George heard large hands fumbling upon the mantelpiece, the unmistakable rattle of a match-box; next an arm midway to the shoulder, and at its extremity a hand bearing a lighted match appeared, and the Stranger Host thoughtfully lit the Newspaper upon which the fire was laid. The dense and acrid smoke produced by our Great Organs of Opinion when they are put to this domestic purpose rose up and enveloped the unhappy George. It was the limit! And with one cry and with one roar, as Macaulay finely says of another crisis, the prospective Warden of the Court of Dowry slid down into the grate, ruining the careful structure of coal and wood, and stood in the presence of--he could scarcely believe his eyes--William Bailey! That tall, bewhiskered, genial oligarch expressed no marked astonishment. It is, alas! a characteristic of the eccentric that, just as he sees the world all wrong where it is normal, so, before the abnormal he is incapable of expressing reasonable emotion. All he said was, in a mild tone of voice: “Well! well! well!” To which Demaine answered, with the solemnity the occasion demanded: “William, don’t you know me?” “Yes, I know you,” said William Bailey thoughtfully, “Dimmy, by God!... Dimmy, d’you know that you present a most extraordinary spectacle?” “You needn’t tell me that,” said Dimmy bitterly, drawing his hand across his mouth and displaying two red lips which appeared in the midst of his features like those of a comedy negro. “The point is what can you do for me?”