And somehow there was after all a kind of relief in these comminatory exercises. The dim light of a possible diversion began to filter through the storm-cloud of Mosscrop’s wrath. He was still bitterly depressed, and furious as well, of course, but self-possession was returning to him, and with it the capacity for planning and ordering his movements. It occurred to him that he ought to do something to turn his thoughts temporarily at least from this world-weary sadness. Up on the opposite corner his eye caught the legend “Savoy Street.” He stared at the small sign, perched above the dingy brick cornice of the first-floor, for a moment with an unreflecting gaze. Then he turned and walked briskly down the steep hillside thoroughfare, and into the courtyard of the great hotel which, like the street and the quarter, commemorates in its name the first of a long and steadfast line of needy Continental princes whose maintenance the British tax-payer has found himself fated to provide. At the desk, he wrote out a card and sent it up as an accompaniment to the inquiry whether Mr. Laban Skinner was in or not. No, it was reported presently; Mr. Skinner had gone out--but the young lady was in. David pondered this unexpected intelligence. “Did she tell you that she was in?” he asked the boy, suspiciously. Yes; she had done so. Mosscrop discovered that he had been quite unprepared for this. He knit his brows and ruminated upon it. His impression had been at the time that the girl disliked him, or at least disliked the proposition which her absurd father had made. It seemed to him, moreover, that he disliked, her in turn. She had stared rudely at poor Vestalia--but then it should be remembered in fairness that all women did that to one another. Her attitude towards him had been ostentatiously apathetic, almost to the point of insolence; and yet he recalled that in that moment when he had caught her unawares, she had been displaying a notable interest in what was going on. The notion that there had been a sort of challenge underlying the mask of studied indifference she had presented to him returned to his mind. And he still needed diversion, too, as much as ever. “If you will show the way,” he said to the boy at this juncture. The lift bore them a long distance upward, quite to the roof it seemed. David formed the impression that rents must be cheap at that altitude; hut when he took the first glance round the sitting-room into which he found himself presently ushered, the idea vanished. It was a large and imposingly-appointed room, exhaling, as it were, an effect of high-priced luxury. The broad windows at the front came down to the floor, and opened upon a balcony. There were awnings hung outside to ward off the sunshine, and this threw the whole apartment into a mellow twilight, contrasting sharply with the brightness of the corridor Mosscrop had just quitted.