At all events, he went to bed on Sunday night with the remark that he had thoroughly enjoyed his visit to Penderworth. A car had been ordered to take him to Wokingham station early on Monday morning. His first act upon reaching the platform was to buy a paper and open it. Across the top of the centre page lay spread the ominous headline: Another tragedy in Praed Street Chapter VI A Middle-aged Poet Mr. Richard Pargent’s public was a very limited one. A few lines of type, of unequal length, would appear from time to time in one of the ultra-artistic magazines, and would be hailed by critics of the new school as yet another deadly blow at the shackles which have hitherto fettered the feet of the muse of poetry. The general public found them incomprehensible, which was perhaps a fortunate circumstance for Mr. Pargent’s reputation. But, in spite of Mr. Pargent’s extreme literary modernity, his surroundings and circumstances were typically mid-Victorian. His age was between fifty and sixty, and he lived with his sister Clara in a tall, narrow house in Bavaria Square, Bayswater. It was, as a matter of fact, the house in which he and his two sisters had been born. On their parents’ death he and Miss Clara Pargent had elected to remain where they were and keep house together. Miss Margaret, younger and more adventurous, had taken unto herself a companion—of the female sex—and migrated to a house in the little town of West Laverhurst, in Wiltshire. It will be gathered from this that the Pargent family were not dependent upon Mr. Richard Pargent’s literary earnings. Each member of it was comparatively well off, and lived according to the standards of mid-Victorian comfort. In their own phrase, they knew quite a number of nice people, and sometimes they found it difficult to make time in which to perform all their social duties. As a consequence, they had little opportunity left for doing anything useful. Although many years had elapsed since Miss Margaret had shaken the dust of Bayswater off her feet and retired to the intellectual wilderness of West Laverhurst, her brother and sister had never completely recovered from the shock of such a revolutionary proceeding. Never before, within the memory of man, had any member of the Pargent family done anything but what was expected of them. And even now, when any of their friends asked after Miss Margaret, they replied with an almost imperceptible hesitation, with the apologetic smile we adopt when speaking of anyone who exhibits such remarkable eccentricity.