"How to describe the meeting between Alicia and the Duke!" the painstaking author would think. Should she rise with heightened colour, her fingers convulsively clutching that portion of the anatomy under which, as it is popularly believed, a fluttering heart thrills at the familiar footstep? Should she run to him hysterically, falling upon his neck and sobbing for very joy? It is a style which has exponents amongst the very best authors. Happy am I, that I am not called upon to invent so difficult a scene. It is the glorious privilege of the reporter that he need not invent. Unless he draws a very high salary indeed, to record events, not as they happened, but as they ought to have happened. In truth she rose with a heightened colour when the Duke was announced, but she offered him her hand conventionally, and—when the door had closed behind the reluctant servant—he took her in his arms and kissed her again and again. I do not know how many times because I was not present, but I should say quite six times. (Six of course is merely an estimate covering their first greeting.) "So you’re back?" she smiled. He held her hands in his. (It would be absurd and presumptuous in me to pretend to give anything that professed to be an exact account of this meeting. I repeat that I was not present.) "I was so horribly afraid," she said earnestly, "I thought when that dreadful man disappeared that possibly he might have followed you, and...." Let us, as the mid-Victorian novelists said, when they found their powers of description failed, draw a veil over that happy meeting, far too sacred ... and too difficult... VII Sir Harry called a Council of War. His Man of Affairs—Smith by name—attended, as also did the Editor of the _Lewisham and Lee Mail_. Mr. R. B. Rake (Member of the Institute of Journalists, as his visiting card testified) was and is, one of the most remarkable personages in Catford. A literateur of no indifferent quality, an authority on postage stamps (I find on referring to Webster’s _Dictionary_ that such an expert is called a philatelist), a vegetarian and a gentleman with pronounced views. Mr. R. B. Rake can be described in one word—tremendous. He had a tremendous voice and a tremendous style, and he quoted the ancient classics inaccurately. He had some Greek, thus he referred to Sir Harry, as of the [Greek: demioergoi], and the Duke as a [Greek: métoikoi]. I have my doubts as to the latter description, and I more than suspect that Mr. Rake, in referring to his grace, thus misapplied the phrase of "privileged alien." Mr. Smith, whose duty it was to supervise Sir Harry’s "rents," was a deferential little man, with a garbled knowledge of the law relating to property. "Now, gentlemen," said Sir Harry briskly, "we’ve got to do something about this Duke man." "Quite so," said Rake, "it is perhaps unparalleled in the constitutional history——"