Harold Jerningham and Laurence Desmond had met very often before to-day. It happened that the Jerninghams were also on their way to Vienna, and had made their arrangements for travelling by the same train as that chosen by Laurence. They met at the station, and travelled together, Mr. Jerningham being very well pleased to find the tedium of the journey beguiled by masculine companionship. Mrs. Jerningham sat in a corner of the carriage, very silent and impenetrable, but beautiful to look upon in the fitful glare of the railway lamp, or in occasional glimpses of moonlight. That night-journey was the beginning of a closer acquaintanceship between Harold Jerningham and Laurence Desmond. During the ensuing London season the younger man was a frequent visitor at the house of the elder. The Jerninghams met Mr. Desmond at parties. They met him in the following winter at a country house; sat round the same fire at Christmas time, and shuddered at the same ghost-stories; danced in the same condescending quadrille at a ball of servants and tenantry, and plucked costly trinkets from the same Christmas-tree--Harold always more or less distinguished by the tone of a being who had endured a previous existence in every star in the planetary system, and was wearily “doing” his last world before final extinction. Mrs. Jerningham had learned by this time to meet her old friend without sudden pallor or sudden blushes. If she met him very often, she met him by favour of that chain of accidents which links together the lives of some men and women. She happened to be buying hyacinths in the Pantheon during the hour which the hard-working editor snatched from the cares of journalism in the sweet cause of friendship, bringing to bear all the forces of his mighty intellect on the selection of a squirrel, intended for a birthday-gift to a fellow-worker’s little girl. If the purchase of the hyacinths and the squirrel occupied a longer time than is usually devoted to such small transactions, it must be remembered that there is great room for the exercise of taste and discretion in the choice of flowers which are to fill a jardinière of the real old _bleu de roi_ Sèvres, and an animal which is to twirl perpetually for the delight of one’s friend. Nor was there anything extraordinary in the fact that Mr. Jerningham and his wife encountered Laurence Desmond ever and anon at the Opera, at the Botanical and Zoological Gardens, and at other places of public resort. The circle in which decent people revolve is such a narrow one that there must needs be these accidental encounters at every turn in the crowded ring. “I fancy we meet Mr. Desmond a little more frequently than other people,” Harold Jerningham said one day to his wife; and this was the only occasion on which he made any special mention of the editor’s name.