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he said aloud. “I’m looking like a corpse.” Impulsively he threw the vial in the fire and turned towards his bed.
    He hardly slept at all that night.
    He set about his business early next morning, the keen mind dulled and impeded with fatigue. He saw the servants after breakfast and gave them, in hard, business-likefashion, the gist of what he had already told the butler; a month’s notice with three month’s pay. Then he sat down and wrote a letter to Elise, hard and efficient, to ask her to remove her things from the house within the month, before he put the furniture in store. He paid a visit to a house agent. And then he went to his solicitor, and sat in conference with him for an hour.
    He lunched at a solitary table in his club, reserved and aloof. In the smoking-room, over his coffee, he fell into an uneasy sleep and woke after twenty minutes of twitching insensibility, dazed and unwell.
    He went down to his office.
    In the house that he had left the servants gathered round to talk about their notice, dispersed to make pretence of work, and gathered round again. “I won’t say but what three months’ pay will be a comfort and a nest egg to put by,” said the cook. “But what a thing to happen in the house!”
    “I never did like black gentlemen,” said Elsie. “That Prince Ali, he gave me the shudders the first time I saw him. What she could see in him …”
    Donaghue, the chauffeur, winked at Evans. “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice, as you might say.”
    “Not in my kitchen,
if
you please, Mr. Donaghue,” said the cook with dignity.
    “Sorry,” said the chauffeur.
    “It’s a pity that it had to happen now,” said Evans. “I’d hoped to get away before the bubble bust. It doesn’t do one any good in getting a new place, this sort of thing.”
    “That’s what I say, Mr. Evans,” said the cook. “Itmakes things very difficult, I’m sure. Mistresses don’t like it, say what you will.”
    “Well,” said the chauffeur. “She’s got a nice new place, and no mistake.”
    “I wouldn’t be too sure she’ll keep it,” said Evans.
    “Ah,” said the cook darkly. “The evil stoop and pick up luck.”
    They moved away about their work again. Donaghue followed Elsie out into the hall. “It’s a rotten break-up, this,” he said. “Just as we were beginning to get to know each other, too.” He had only been there for about two months. He was cursing himself, boyishly and miserably, that he had not made more headway with the girl in that two months. He hadn’t wanted to rush things. And now this bust-up had come.
    “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “But that’s life all over, that is. Just as you think you’ve got nicely settled down, something happens.”
    “That’s right,” he said enthusiastically. “I’ve often thought it was like that.”
    They stood in silent, intimate communion for a moment.
    He mustered his courage. “Were you doing anything to-morrow afternoon? Your half day, isn’t it?”
    She said, “I always go and see my Aunt Millie, at Streatham. She’s been ever so good to me since I came to London.”
    “I was wondering if you’d like to see a picture,” he said awkwardly. “There’s some good ones on …”
    She smiled radiantly on him. “That’s ever so nice of you, Mr. Donaghue,” she said. “I could see Aunt Millie on Sunday. I could get ready by half-past two.”
    “That’s a date,” he said, and went to polish a clean car in an exultant dream.
    Warren worked steadily for some hours in his office. He cleared up the arrears of his work with some half-formed idea that he might go away. He was tired and stale. He had no particular desire to take a holiday, but he could not go on in Grosvenor Square alone. He felt that he must have a break in his routine.
    “Looking like death again this afternoon,” remarked his typist to her friend. “I bet there’s something wrong.”
    He knocked a pencil from his desk in the late afternoon,