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occupant, flinging his cigarette away as he did so, and laying one hand on the handle of the door, as though about to enter the car. Before he could do so, two men emerged suddenly and silently from a shop-entrance. One of them spoke to the chauffeur; the other put his hand on the gentleman's elegant arm. A brief sentence or two were exchanged; then the one man got up beside the chauffeur while the second man opened the door of the car. The man in dress-clothes got in, the other man followed, and the whole party drove off. The whole thing was so quickly done that almost before Miss Parton could turn round in answer to Miss Rossiter's exclamation, it was all over.
    “An arrest!” breathed Miss Rossiter, her eyes shining. “Those two were detectives. I wonder what our friend in the monocle's been doing.”
    Miss Parton was thrilled.
    “And we actually spoke to him and thought it was Bredon.”
    “ I spoke to him,” corrected Miss Rossiter. It was all very well for Miss Parton to claim the credit, but only a few minutes back she had rather pointedly dissociated herself from the indiscretion and she could not be allowed to have it both ways.
    “You did, then,” agreed Miss Parton. “I'm surprised at you, Rossie, trying to get off with a smart crook. Anyhow, if Bredon doesn't turn up tomorrow, we'll know it was him after all.”

    But it could hardly have been Mr. Bredon, for he was in his place the next morning just as usual. Miss Rossiter asked him if he had a double.
    “Not that I know of,” said Mr. Bredon. “One of my cousins is a bit like me.”
    Miss Rossiter related the incident, with slight modifications. On consideration, she thought it better not to mention that she had been mistaken for a lady of easy virtue.
    “Oh, I don't think that would be my cousin,” replied Mr. Bredon. “He's a frightfully proper person. Well known at Buckingham Palace, and all that.”
    “Go on,” said Miss Rossiter.
    “I'm the black sheep of the family,” said Mr. Bredon. “He never even sees me in the street. It must have been some one quite different.”
    “Is your cousin called Bredon, too?”
    “Oh, yes,” said Mr. Bredon.

CHAPTER III
    INQUISITIVE INTERVIEWS OF A NEW COPY-WRITER
    M r. Bredon had been a week with Pym's Publicity, and had learnt a number of things. He learned the average number of words that can be crammed into four inches of copy; that Mr. Armstrong's fancy could be caught by an elaborately-drawn lay-out, whereas Mr. Hankin looked on art-work as waste of a copy-writer's time; that the word “pure” was dangerous, because, if lightly used, it laid the client open to prosecution by the Government inspectors, whereas the words “highest quality,” “finest ingredients,” “packed under the best conditions” had no legal meaning, and were therefore safe; that the expression “giving work to umpteen thousand British employees in our model works at so-and-so” was not by any means the same thing as “British made throughout”; that the north of England liked its butter and margarine salted, whereas the south preferred it fresh; that the Morning Star would not accept any advertisements containing the word “cure,” though there was no objection to such expressions as “relieve” or “ameliorate,” and that, further, any commodity that professed to “cure” anything might find itself compelled to register as a patent medicine and use an expensive stamp; that the most convincing copy was always written with the tongue in the cheek, a genuine conviction of the commodity's worth producing–for some reason–poverty and flatness of style; that if, by the most far-fetched stretch of ingenuity, an indecent meaning could be read into a headline, that was the meaning that the great British Public would infallibly read into it; that the great aim and object of the studio artist was to crowd the copy out of the advertisement and that, conversely, the copy-writer was a designing villain whose