He ruminated on that about as far as Cleopatra’s Needle; there, as he leant upon the parapet of the Embankment and looked down into the water, a second thought rose upon the horizon of his mind: the £5000 a year would be his, not Sudie’s. In the first stage of this nightly ramble he had barged into two men: one a poor man who had made the accident the excuse for the delivery of money; the second a rich one who cursed him abominably, but George was in too equable a mood to mind. Now, as he left Cleopatra’s Needle behind him and strolled still farther eastward, ruminating upon the fact that the £5000 a year would be his and not Sudie’s, he had the misfortune to cannon against yet a third, to whom he apologised: but it was a post, not a man. He looked at it with those slow, sensible eyes of his for perhaps thirty seconds, and saw in large red letters under the electric light “Motors to the right of this post.” He repeated the phrase mechanically as was often his wont upon reading anything, and it set up a new train of thought. Post.... The post offered him was not permanent ... but he considered the careers of his friends and he could remember none, neither Ted nor Johnny nor old Bill Curliss, nor Fittleworth nor Glegg, who from the moment they had received such promotion had not gone forward. It always meant something, even when one was out of office, and then who knows? One might be in office again. A Party may be in office twice running! Stranger things had happened. And then, even if they went out of office, Ole Man Benson would have brought something off by that time. Look at it how he would, heaven was smiling on him, and he in return, and as though in gratitude, smiled at the gaunt front of Blackfriars Station, opposite which he had now arrived. Between him and it there lay the street, and he was naturally too cautious to attempt to cross until he had gazed carefully to the front and right. But at midnight there is no pressure of traffic in the City of London, and when he had allowed a belated dray and a steam roller to pass him at their leisure he hurriedly crossed over with a vague intention of taking the train. Like many men of the governing classes, whose mental activities are naturally divorced from the petty details of London life, and who are independent of that daily round which makes the less fortunate only too familiar with our means of communication, George Mulross Demaine was not quite certain where the Underground went to, nor what part of London precisely it served. But he had been taught from childhood that it was circular in form, and that round it like Old Ocean[3] in a perpetual race, went along streams of trains. Enter it where you would, and you might leave it somewhere upon its periphery.