There was a mist round the coffee-stall when I found it: one of those strange, fugitive fogs that drift like ghosts at night in the hollows. In the mist the stall was a glow-worm, yellow and furry, warm and desirable, a home to wanderers and fly-by-nights, comforting with its smell of hot coffee and its pungent, inviting sizzle. Six or seven people, black against the yellowness and the banked Woodbines and the tiers of depressing cakes, gazed round suspiciously as I came in out of the incalculable dark, for after a certain time of morning every plain man may have the mark of the devil on him. Round this stall were the following people: A young man with a silk hat on the back of his head and a white evening scarf hanging over a white shirt front. A young girl with yellow, shingled hair and a pair of silver dance-shoes peeping out from under a moleskin cloak. A very arch young woman, who was making hopeless eyes at the young man in the silk hat out of sheer enthusiasm, as she ground cigarette stump after cigarette stump into her saucer. Three or four workmen from neighbouring road repairs. Two men holding little black bags, who may have been telephone officials, burglars, printers, disguised peers, or returning prodigal sons, but mostly they looked like uncles from Balham. From the young man in the silk hat I eavesdropped that everything was "topping" and that Millie was "awfully struck" on Arthur, and from his pretty partner I gathered that coffee and buns at 3 A.M. were awfully good fun, and that she had sprung a ladder in her stocking. "By why," she asked, "are coffee-stalls licensed to sell stamps?" The arch young woman looked up swiftly, and said all in one breath: "So that men can write home and tell their wives why they were kept late at the office. Who's going to stand me a coffee?" No one laughed; then, surprisingly, one of the solemn Balham uncles put down the money and as solemnly went on talking to his companion about horses. The arch lady turned her back on them, drank her coffee, borrowed a broken mirror, rouged her lips, said, "Well, cheerio, all!" and vanished, archly. A taxicab driver arrived with a clatter, excavated threepence from that deep remoteness where all taxicab drivers keep their money, and departed with the young man and the young woman. The Balham uncles went off with a non-committal air, which made me wonder whether they were off to break into a house or off home to sleep beneath a scriptural text.