He had always cherished the belief that when he retired it would be to go to the first real home he had ever known. The home, as he pictured it, was a little detached villa at New Brighton. It would face the sea and there would be tamarisk bushes, forming a guard of honour, from the garden gate to the front door. He had worked out how each room would look—just what furniture and pictures there would be—as though it were a scene in a play. Every detail was cut and dried and ordered in his mind. This was to be his compensation for the sacrifice of his profession. And now——! Four hundred pounds and his lonely self were all that remained. For about six weeks Eliphalet Cardomay drifted aimlessly. He had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Late hours having been the habit of his lifetime, it was impossible to go early to bed, and the empty evenings hung like lead upon his hands. A letter or two came from America, forwarded from his old lodging, and these were the only bright spots on a desolate landscape. Sunday was a day that bothered him dreadfully. Every Sunday for forty years he had been accustomed to the rush of packing—of cabs—porters and long train-journeys. To sit idle in his rooms and read the _Referee_, which in the past had often seemed a very desirable thing to do, proved in practice a very trying ordeal. He fretted all the morning with a sense of important duties neglected, and usually finished up by walking to the nearest railway station to watch the theatrical trains pull out. Then he would return and settle down, with a sigh, to an afternoon of irksome inactivity. He had never been a man with a wide circle of friends, and the few acquaintances he met mostly took their pleasures by leaning across the bar or hiving round the cheese at a Bodega—a practice which he showed no disposition to emulate. In consequence he was thrown entirely on his own resources, and, as a result, there set in a kind of incipient melancholy. He began to speculate how long four hundred pounds would last, at an expenditure of thirty shillings a week. “And three years of this sort of thing is about as much as we could stand, old boy,” he said, when he looked at the result of the calculation. So he continued to drift in a melancholy isolation, until one day, upon a bench in Roundhay Park, he espied a familiar figure. It was a man—or, more truthfully, what was left of a man—poor, shivering, down-and-out. But Eliphalet needed no second glance to assure him that here was Sefton Bulmore—old Sefton, who had done him a good turn—old Sefton, squeezed from the boards to make room for younger blood and fresher funniosities. “Sefton!” said Eliphalet, stretching out his hand.