"I implore you to come immediately. A matter of life and death." Meanwhile, Jardine had settled his affairs, and finished with the business of life. Like the King of old, he turned his face to the wall. Yet startling things were occurring close at hand--strange occurrences within this very city of Bath. To others they were sufficiently alarming. Indeed, there had been something in the nature of a panic. The first manifestation had taken place at the Grand Pump Room Hotel. The King of Bath, if he could have come to his realm again, would have encountered not a few surprises, and would have found the famous Hotel transformed beyond all recognition. The examples of London, Paris, and New York had been diligently followed. There was a stately Palm Court, with marble columns and gilded cornices. Oriental rugs and luxurious fauteuils had been lavishly provided. On a raised marble terrace, during the dinner hour, a stringed band furnished an undercurrent for the banal remarks of the diners. There were rooms in the Adams style, rooms in the Louis the Sixteenth style, a Charles II. Smaller dining Room, and a Smoking Room in the Elizabethan style--with ingle-nook and heavy ceiling beams in oak. But the people who dined and chattered and smoked amid these surroundings were not Elizabethan, Stuart, or Georgian in style. They were the product of the twentieth century, and were of no style at all; they lacked repose and dignity; they were self-conscious, self-assertive; believers, and encouraged to believe, in the powers of the almighty dollar, hustlers and bustlers, who rushed hither and thither, and did this or that without knowledge and without appreciation, and solely for the purpose of being able to say that they had done it. Everything inanimate in this twentieth-century Bath Hotel was very beautiful. There were skilful imitations of Adams, Sheraton, and Chippendale; there were coloured marbles, trophies, garlands, ornamentation of all sorts in gilt and bronze; decorative panels, with consoles and mirrors everywhere,--everything being in elaborate imitation of something else and something older. But in one corner of the Grand Dining Hall was one thing real and old--a fountain of Sulis water, which had been brought into a decorative niche and enshrined amid elaborate allegorical figures which nobody understood.