He sat, collapsed, dirty and defeated, in the Austrian bent-wood rocking-chair. What was that irruption of evening newsboys shouting? Repulse of some General, English or Dutch, at some berg or drift; surrender of some other, Dutch or English, at some drift or berg. He was even too collapsed to go out and buy a halfpenny paper. He didn't care about anything. Besides, it was the same every evening. Damn the Boers! Damn Cecil Rhodes! The shouters had passed--a _prestissimo_ movement in the Street Symphony--selling rapidly, before he had changed his mind, and wished he had bought a _Star_. Never mind!--there would be another edition out by the time he went to dinner at Machiavelli's. He sat on meditating in the gloom, and wondering how long it would be before it was all jolly again. Of course it _would_ be--but when? A sound like a nervous burglar making an attempt on a Chubb lock caught his ear and interested him. He appeared to identify it as Mrs. Gapp trying to use a latchkey, but unsuccessfully. He seemed maliciously amused, but not to have any intention of helping. Presently the sound abdicated, in favour of a subterranean bell of a furtive and irresolute character. Said Mr. Aiken, then, to Space, "Mrs. Verity won't hear that, you may bet your Sunday garters," and then went by easy stages to the front-door, to see--so further soliloquy declared--how sober his housekeeper was after so long an absence. A glance at the good woman convinced him that her register of sobriety would stand at zero on any maker's sobriometer. She said that a vaguely defined community, called The Boys, had been tampering with the lock. Mr. Aiken, from long experience of her class at this stage, was able to infer this from what sounded like "Boysh been 'tlocksh--keylocksh--inchfearunsh." This pronounced exactly phonetically will be clear to the student of Alcoholism; be so good as to read it absolutely literally. "Lock's all right enough!" said Mr. Aiken, after turning it freely both ways. "Nobody's been interfering with it. You're drunk, Mrs. Gapp." Mrs. Gapp stood steady, visibly. Now, you can't stand steady, visibly, without a suspicion of a lurch to show how splendidly you are maintaining your balance. Without it your immobility might be mere passionless inertia. Mrs. Gapp's eyes seemed as little under her control as her voice, and each had a strange, inherent power of convincing the observer that the other was looking the wrong way. "Me?" said Mrs. Gapp. "Yes--you!" said Mr. Aiken.