“Brr! But it was cold out there! I shouldn’t care to be lying in my grave a night like this. Don’t _you_ ever have a sore throat from smoking?” He pocketed the handkerchief after a furtive peep. “Oh, yes, sometimes,” I replied, wondering, while I spoke, into what agonies of terror I should fall if ever I saw those bright-red danger-signals under my nose. Young Mr. Cashell among the batteries coughed slightly to show that he was quite ready to continue his scientific explanations, but I was thinking still of the girl with the rich voice and the significantly cut mouth, at whose command I had taken charge of the shop. It flashed across me that she distantly resembled the seductive shape on a gold-framed toilet-water advertisement whose charms were unholily heightened by the glare from the red bottle in the window. Turning to make sure, I saw Mr. Shaynor’s eyes bent in the same direction, and by instinct recognised that the flamboyant thing was to him a shrine. “What do you take for your—cough?” I asked. “Well, I’m the wrong side of the counter to believe much in patent medicines. But there are asthma cigarettes and there are pastilles. To tell you the truth, if you don’t object to the smell, which is very like incense, I believe, though I’m not a Roman Catholic, Blaudett’s Cathedral Pastilles relieve me as much as anything.” “Let’s try.” I had never raided a chemist’s shop before, so I was thorough. We unearthed the pastilles—brown, gummy cones of benzoin—and set them alight under the toilet-water advertisement, where they fumed in thin blue spirals. “Of course,” said Mr. Shaynor, to my question, “what one uses in the shop for one’s self comes out of one’s pocket. Why, stock-taking in our business is nearly the same as with jewellers—and I can’t say more than that. But one gets them”—he pointed to the pastille-box—“at trade prices.” Evidently the censing of the gay, seven-tinted wench with the teeth was an established ritual which cost something. “And when do we shut up shop?” “We stay like this all night. The gov—old Mr. Cashell—doesn’t believe in locks and shutters as compared with electric light. Besides it brings trade. I’ll just sit here in the chair by the stove and write a letter, if you don’t mind. Electricity isn’t my prescription.”