“Good God,” he said, “what the hell—crumph, crumph—what do you mean, sir?” Equally surprised, I have always been glad to remember that I was the first to recover my equanimity. Laughing merrily, I handed him the second envelope—in point of bestowal, of course, the first. “Although you must not assume,” I said, “that my natural mirth in any degree condones your involuntary blasphemy.” “Condones my what?” he said. “Crumph, crumph. But how the devil did she get hold of them?” Still clinging to the original envelope, whose texture he obviously recognized, his globular eyes continued to be focussed on the two buttons before him. Briefly I explained to him the circumstances of their detachment. But for a considerable time he kept referring to the subject. “I don’t like it,” he said, “I don’t like it at all. It’s not seemly. It might have been very serious.” Then a new suspicion darkened his countenance. “I suppose I may assume,” he said, “that you’ve had them replaced?” I bowed reassuringly. “By a tailor in Enfield,” I said, “who was incidentally a great admirer of you.” His face cleared a little. [Illustration: _Mr. Chrysostom Lorton_ ] “Eh, what?” he said. “An admirer, you say? What was his name?” I informed him and he nodded his head. “Ah, yes, yes,” he said, “a worthy young fellow.” By an auspicious chance too—if indeed it were one—a female clerk now entered the room, bearing in her hands a specimen copy of the nineteenth edition of the Bible for Schools. He glanced up from his wife’s letter. “Yes, yes,” he said, “that will interest you.” “Nothing,” I replied, “could have interested me more, unless perhaps a specimen of the twentieth.” Afterwards, as I shall show, my initial distrust of the man proved to have been only too well founded. But, as matters turned out on this particular afternoon, I left his office as a junior assistant. Placed under the charge of the show-room manager, I was to help this gentleman with his accounts and to act when necessary as a salesman of the firm’s congenial and Xtian literature. It was a supreme moment—it was perhaps, in a good many ways, the supremest moment of my life—and I did not hesitate, after some further buns, to make suitable acknowledgment of it in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Nor was the news with which I was confronted on my return to Angela Gardens entirely able to counteract the deep satisfaction with which it filled me. Nevertheless it was perhaps a timely reminder of the ever-present imminence of eternity, and it was certainly one that I have made a point of recalling in many subsequent moments of elation. For hardly had I opened the front gate when somebody touched me on the shoulder, and turning round, I observed Simeon Whey looking more preoccupied than I had ever seen him. His lips at any rate were moving rather convulsively and his laryngeal spasm was extremely marked. “Kck,” he said. “It’s Silas.” “Dear me,” I replied. “What’s the matter with him?”