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Evans?”
    “Could I have a word with you, sir?”
    “Certainly. Go ahead.”
    The man coughed. “I am afraid I must give you my notice, sir. I am sorry to inconvenience you, but I would like to leave in a month’s time.”
    Warren was silent for a minute, sipping his coffee. Then he said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Evans. Why do you want to go?”
    The man hesitated, and then said awkwardly, “No particular reason, sir. Just that I can’t feel settled here.”
    “Is the money all right?”
    “Oh, quite all right, sir. But I feel that I should be better for a change.”
    Warren glanced up at the man, standing deferentially before him. “I see. As a matter of fact, Evans, I was going to speak to all of you to-morrow. Mrs. Warren will not be coming back to live here. I’m closing down this house, and going to live in chambers.”
    “I am very sorry to hear that, sir.”
    Warren nodded. “I was going to give you all a month’s notice, with three months’ wages. So you needn’t feel you’re inconveniencing me.”
    “That is very generous treatment, sir. I am sure the staff will appreciate your kindness, in the circumstances.”He hesitated. “With things the way they are, sir, I am sorry that I gave you notice. But I wasn’t to know.”
    “That’s all right. As a matter of interest, why did you want to leave?”
    The butler hesitated again. “I don’t know that I can quite answer that, sir. But it hasn’t been the sort of house that one would care to spend one’s life in, if you understand what I mean.”
    Warren said, “I understand.” He nodded to the man. “All right Evans—that’ll do. I’ll see you all in the morning.”
    The man left him, and he sat for a long time before the fire, quiet and motionless, full of reflection. So that was it. His house, his mode of life, had become so notorious that decent servants wouldn’t stay with him; they had their own lives to consider. He did not blame them. But if that was what his servants thought about it all, what would London and the City think?
    Prince Ali Said … Already he could frame the limericks and the conundrums in his mind. He knew the Stock Exchange.
    He sat on in the library, quiet, without reading; as the fire died the shadows closed in upon him. He had worked hard all his life. He had been in the Gunners in the War and had risen to command a battery; he could still remember the sequence of his firing orders, the colours of the different grades of shell, and that you concentrated when the aiming point was in the rear. He had gone into his father’s bank at the Armistice and had worked hard in the City for the last fifteen years.
    His life, he thought, was more than half over. Hehad worked hard since he was a boy; what had he got to show for it?
    His wife had left him, had preferred a coloured man. His house was one that decent people would not stay in, even if they were servants. He had few friends; he worked too hard for that. His health was still good, but he had grown nervous and irritable; that was the work again, the difficulty that he had in sleeping due to lack of exercise, perhaps, due also to the drugs he took to make him sleep. In the morning he would take the necessary steps to close the house and put it up for sale. Then, he supposed, he would go and live in a service flat, and try to build up a new life—for what? For more work? He had worked hard for fifteen years and had got nothing, it seemed to him, that was worth having.
    Presently he left the library and went up to his room. He stood for a time looking at his face in the mirror; he saw it to be lined and haggard, the face of a man older than his years. He turned away, and went mechanically to the drawer of his dressing-table; he would not sleep that night without the assistance of his allonal.
    He took the little vial in his hand. He saw an old face twitching at him from the mirror; the battery major straightened up, a gust of passion swept over him. “My God,”