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the past two months when, if anyone had told Tipton Plimsoll that his only hope was to go into a monastery, he would have welcomed the suggestion as sound and decided to act upon it.
    But to come across with that sort of stuff on a morning when the sun was shining and he was feeling like a million dollars was another matter altogether. And what he was saying to himself, as the cab drew up at the entrance of Barribault's, was that it was his moral duty to teach the man a sharp lesson which would make him more careful another time about talking through his hat in this irresponsible fashion.
    Nor did it take him long to divine the correct procedure, to formulate the firm, spirited policy which would bathe E. J. Murgatroyd in confusion and cause him to feel about as silly as any Harley Street practitioner had felt since the invention of medicine bottles. And that was to make straight for Barribault's bar, push four or five nourishing drinks down the hatch, and then go back and confront the man all bursting with health, and say: 'Well, Murgatroyd, dear old chap, it may interest you to learn that since I saw you last I've been mopping up the stuff like a vacuum cleaner, and I feel, if possible, better than ever. As for all that rot you talked about seeing faces, I haven't seen a sign of a face. What have you to say to that, Murgatroyd? Try that on your bazooka, E. Jimpson.'
    With Tipton Plimsoll, to think was to act. It was with a song
upon his lips that he established himself at the counter and told the man behind it to limber up his wrists and start pouring, for a big cash customer had arrived.
    At about the same moment a young man who had been staring out into the street through the swing doors suddenly swerved away from them and came hurrying towards the bar. He was a massive young man who looked like a kindly gorilla and seemed to be labouring under some sort of nervous strain. His name was Lister, William Galahad, and he had come to Barribault's to book a table for his wedding breakfast.
II
    When large earnest men with simple orderly minds fall desperately in love with small, reckless, impulsive girls whose motto is 'Anything goes,' the result is not infrequently to make them feel as if their souls had been stirred up with a pole; and in conveying the impression that he was labouring under a nervous strain Bill Lister in no way deceived his public. Ever since the tempestuous entry into his life of Prudence Garland, he had been feeling almost without interruption rather as one might imagine a leaf to feel when caught up and whirled about in an autumn gale.
    Bill's was essentially a simple, orderly mind. Nature had intended him to be one of those men to whom love, when it comes, comes gently and gradually, progressing in easy stages from the first meeting in rigidly conventional circumstances to the decorous wedding with the ushers showing friends and relatives into the ringside pews. If ever there was a man born to be the morning-coated central figure in a wedding group photograph, it was William Galahad Lister.
    And here he was, after a month of hectic secret meetings and passionate secret correspondence, about to sneak off to a clandestine union at a registry office.
    Not that he minded, of course. It was all right with him. If Prudence had wanted a Hollywood wedding with brass bands, cameras, and full floodlighting effects, he would have screwed his courage to the sticking point and gone through with it. For he had never lost sight of the fact that the nub of the thing, the aspect of the affair to keep the eye fixed on, was that she was going to be his wife. But there were moments when he could have wished that matters had arranged themselves somewhat differently, and one of the improvements which he could have suggested offhand would have been a change in venue for the wedding breakfast.
    It is the boast of Barribault's Hotel, which caters principally to American millionaires and visiting maharajahs, that it can make the