He would have liked to detain her with elaborate instructions about the exact spot on the carpet where she would find him waiting for her on Wednesday; but she had shaken him lightly by the hand and crossed the road before he could decide between the entrance in Regent Street and the entrance in Pall Mall. "It is becoming every day more evident, Mrs. Worfolk," John told his housekeeper after supper that evening, "that I must begin to look about for a secretary." "Yes, sir," she agreed, cheerfully. "There's lots of deserving young fellows would be glad of the job, I'm shaw." John left it at that, acknowledged Mrs. Worfolk's wishes for his night's repose, poured himself out a whisky and soda, and settled himself down to read a gilded work at fifteen shillings net entitled _Fifteen Famous Forgers_. When he had read three shillings' worth, he decided that the only crime which possessed a literary interest for anybody outside the principals was murder, and went to bed early in order to prepare for the painful interview at Staple Inn next morning. Stephen Crutchley, the celebrated architect, was some years older than John, old enough in fact to have been severely affected by the esthetic movement in his early twenties; he had a secret belief that was nourished both by his pre-eminence in Gothic design and by his wife's lilies and languors that he formed a link with the Pre-Raphaelites. His legs were excessively short, but short though they were one of them had managed to remain an inch shorter than the other, which in conjunction with a ponderous body made his gait something between a limp and a shamble. He had a long ragged beard which looked as if he had dropped egg or cigarette-ash on it according to whether the person who was deciding its color thought it was more gray or more yellow. His appearance was usually referred to by paragraph writers as leonine, and he much regretted that his beard was turning gray so soon, when what the same writers called his "tawny mane of hair" was still unwithered. He affected the Bohemian costume of the 'eighties, that is to say the velvet jacket, the flowered silk waistcoat, and the unknotted tie of deep crimson or old gold kept in place by a prelate's ring; he lunched every day at the Arts Club, and since he was making at least L6000 a year, he did not bother to go back to his office in the afternoon. John had met him first soon after his father's death in 1890 somewhere in Northamptonshire where Crutchley was restoring a church--his first big job--and where John was editing temporarily a local paper. In those days John reacting from dog-biscuits was every bit as romantic as he was now; he and the young architect had often talked the sun up and spoken ecstatically of another medieval renaissance, of the nobility of handicrafts and of the glory of the guilds. Later on, when John in the reaction from journalism embarked upon realistic novels, Crutchley was