“I only offer them to suitable persons,” the man said, folding up one of the handbills while he spoke, “and I’m sure you will not regret taking it,” and he slipped the paper into Eustace’s hand and walked rapidly away.

Eustace looked after him curiously for a moment, and then opened the paper in his hand.  When his eyes comprehended its significance, he gave a low whistle of astonishment.  “You will soon be warning a coffin!” it read.  “At 606, Gray’s Inn Road, your order will be attended to with civility and despatch.  Call and see us!!”

Eustace swung round quickly to look for the man, but he was out of sight.  The wind was growing colder, and the lamps were beginning to shine out in the greying streets.  Eustace crumpled the paper into his overcoat pocket, and turned homewards.

“How silly!” he said to himself, in conscious amusement.  The sound of his footsteps on the pavement rang like an echo to his laugh.

II

Eustace was impressionable but not temperamentally morbid, and he was troubled a little by the fact that the gruesomely bizarre handbill continued to recur to his mind.  The thing was so manifestly absurd, he told himself with conviction, that it was not worth a second thought, but this did not prevent him from thinking of it again and again.  What manner of undertaker could hope to obtain business by giving away foolish handbills in the street?  Really, the whole thing had the air of a brainless practical joke, yet his intellectual fairness forced him to admit that as far as the man who had given him the bill was concerned, brainlessness was out of the question, and joking improbable.  There had been depths in those little bright eyes which his glance had not been able to sound, and the man’s manner in making him accept the handbill had given the whole transaction a kind of ludicrous significance.

“You will soon be wanting a coffin——!”

Eustace found himself turning the words over and over in his mind.  If he had had any near relations he might have construed the thing as an elaborate threat, but he was practically alone in the world, and it seemed to him that he was not likely to want a coffin for anyone but himself.

“Oh damn the thing!” he said impatiently, as he opened the door of his flat, “it isn’t worth worrying about.  I mustn’t let the whim of some mad tradesman get on my nerves.  I’ve got no one to bury, anyhow.”

Nevertheless the thing lingered with him all the evening, and when his neighbour the doctor came in for a chat at ten o’clock, Eustace was glad to show him the strange handbill.  The doctor, who had experienced the queer magics that are practised to this day on the West Coast of Africa, and who, therefore, had no nerves, was delighted with so striking an example of British commercial enterprise.

“Though, mind you,” he added gravely, smoothing the crumpled paper on his knee, “this sort of thing might do a lot of harm if it fell into the hands of a nervous subject.  I should be inclined to punch the head of the ass who perpetrated it.  Have you turned that address up in the Post Office Directory?”