With much ceremony and clinking of glasses (a bottle of Benedictine was specially opened for the occasion and ruthlessly carried into the drawing-room in defiance of all decent convention) Guy was sealed of the tribe of Howard. “Oh!” An exclamation from Mr. Doyle caused all heads to turn in his direction. He was smiting the back of a chair with clenched fist. “_I_ know the man for us!” cried Mr. Doyle. “The very fellow! As ordinary and decent as you like, and the sort of man whose reactions it’s almost impossible to predict. And it’d do him all the good in the world, too. He wants shaking up badly. It might be the saving of him to imagine for twenty-four hours that he’d killed a man. A fellow called Priestley. . . .” Chapter III. Mr. Priestley Is Adventurous To say that Mr. Priestley had been seriously perturbed by the vegetable accusations that had been hurled against him, would be to overstate the case; to say that he dismissed them immediately with complacent assurance from his mind, would be to trifle with the truth. During the few days that followed the young man’s visit Mr. Priestley was at some pains to prove to himself over and over again that he could not, by any stretch of imagination, be truthfully termed a turnip. The outburst he explained with complete satisfaction as the spasmodic attempt of a nervous mentality, disordered by love, to convert the whole world to its own way of thinking and being; and he put the whole thing out of his mind as unworthy of serious consideration, exactly forty-eight separate times. Yet these baseless insinuations of our friends, dismiss, explain or shelve them as we will, have a habit of rankling. We _know_ that they are baseless, because of course they are; but they rankle—perhaps out of their own sheer baselessness. It is extraordinarily annoying of them. Without his quite realising the fact, a spirit of restlessness began to pervade the ordered round of Mr. Priestley’s daily life. He did things he had never done before. He snapped at his perfectly good man; he sniffed the spring air, while vague and foolish aspirations filled his bosom; several times he looked almost with distaste at the unoccupied chair on the other side of his hearth, instead of congratulating himself as usual on its emptiness; he conceived something approaching dislike for the pleasantly impossible idealism of Theocritus, and substituted the cynical Theophrastes as his bedside book. On Saturday evening things reached a climax. Shattering into small fragments the record of years, Mr. Priestley shook the dust of his flat off his feet (or performed the motions of shaking dust off feet, in the total absence of the commodity itself) and went out to dine at a restaurant! No snail, Mr. Priestley felt sure, ever forsakes its house to dine at a restaurant. His vindication was surely complete.