shocked--and she a grown-up married woman, too--that she jumped up like a scalded cat and let out some sickening howls, and up come the police. Now you can’t help thinking they were waiting behind a tree with old Spirit as a bait, can you? and caught young Gerald instead of a Dean.... They’d get more promotion, I shouldn’t wonder, for a Dean....” And as Guy spoke I saw Gerald glancing at the evening-paper on the curb of Curzon Street, and I saw him suddenly throw back his head and laugh at the heavens.... Gerald, Gerald! The despiser of the world caught by the meanest trap of the world’s unrest. The worshipper of the hero who had died “for purity” figuring in the filthy columns of the cheap Sunday Press as another peer’s nephew gone wrong. Gerald, starved of life, Gerald who knew no woman, Gerald who wrote the tale of a man who had lived “for purity” ... and he had sat down beside a woman called Spirit on a bench in Hyde Park. Those nightmare women who rave in the minds of lonely men, soft women marvellously acquiescent, possible, the woman Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, silent as marble, but acquiescent ... and Aphrodite had dwindled into Mrs. Spirit, who was sitting waiting for her brother in Hyde Park, and the law lurking nearby to give the Sunday papers “copy.” And I saw Mr. Auk in an angle of the little tunnel, telling a friend of his something funny about Gerald.... “It makes one just sick, Guy. Sick....” “Now look here,” Guy murmured, tapping my shoulder with one finger. “Don’t you waste any time being sick just now, but go round and see the young devil----” “I’m going straight away.” “Bright boy. And just ... Oh, tell him it’s all right and not to be an ass all his life. Tell him we’re all on his side, and if there’s going to be any being sick that we’re all going to be sick together and in one corporate body, or words to that effect. Poor young devil. And I know he’ll be feeling this, because I had a sort of eye on him in France, and he seemed as sensitive as a violin string----” “And drink’s made him worse now. He’s almost certain to be nearly speechless to-night. But I’ll see.” “Lord, O Lord, what a mess Barty left behind him! But you see what I mean? All you’ve got to tell young Gerald is not to make a mountain of this in his mind, as it’s the sort of thing that might happen to any one who is ass enough to go into the Park at night without an escort, and you never know but they mightn’t one night arrest the Bishop of London himself for saying ‘How do’ to his aunt....”