“THIS morning,” he began, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs, “I mislaid my cigarette-case. I knew it was somewhere in the study, but find it I could not. Finally, having searched all over my writing table, I rang the bell, and somewhat irritably demanded its immediate production. The butler stepped forward and lifted it up from the centre of the blotting pad, where it had been the whole time, literally under my nose. What peculiar temporary kink in the brain had prevented my noticing the very thing I was looking for, when it was lying in the most conspicuous place in which it could possibly have been, I don’t know. I leave that to the Doctor. But the point of my parable is this—it decided in my mind the story with which I should bore you fellows to-night.” He paused to light a cigar, then he glanced round at the faces of the other five. “And if, as I get on with it, you think you recognise the real characters under the fictional names I shall give them, I can’t prevent you. But don’t ask me to confirm your thoughts.” “Exactly,” murmured the Actor. “Fire ahead.” “It was about four years before the war,” commenced the Barrister, “that I was stopping for a few nights at a certain house in Park Lane. It was in the middle of the season—June, to be accurate—and I was waiting to get in here. My wife was in the country, and, as I was more or less at a loose end, I accepted the offer of staying at this house. My hostess—shall we call her Granger, Ruth Granger—had been an old school pal of my wife’s; in later years she had become a real, intimate friend of us both. “At the time of which I speak she was a lovely girl of twenty-six, with the suffering of six years of hell in her eyes. At the age of twenty she had married Sir Henry Granger, and that fatal mistake had been the cause of the hell. Henry Granger was one of the most loathsome brutes it has ever been my misfortune to run across. He had not one single instinct of a gentleman in him, though he did happen to be the tenth baronet. How her parents had ever allowed the marriage beat me completely. Perhaps it was money, for Granger was rich; but whatever it was she married him, and her hell began. “Granger was simply an animal, a coarse and vicious animal. He drank heavily without getting drunk, which is always a dangerous sign, and he possessed the morals—or did not possess the morals, whichever you prefer—of a monkey. He was unfaithful to her on their honeymoon—my wife told me that; and from then on he made not the slightest attempt to conceal his mode of life.”