of Sir Egbert Rome’s, which had jingled in his head all that afternoon.  Presently it tripped him up again, like the gross melody of a music-hall song, and caused him to drop absently upon the first seat, quite unconscious that it was in an unwholesome condition of moisture.  He had turned his back on the brilliant patches of yellow and copper-coloured chrysanthemums on the flower-plots facing Park Lane, and he looked westwards over a wider expanse of grass and trees:  the grass bestrewed with bright autumnal leaves, the trees obscured and formless, in a rising white mist, through which a pale sun struggled and was vanquished.  He had never been in a fitter mood to appreciate the decay of the year, and suddenly he was seized, in the midst of his depression, with an immense thrill, almost causing him to throw out his arms with an embracing gesture to the autumn, the very personal charm, the mysterious and pitiful fascination of the season whose visible beauty seems to include all spiritual things.  It cast a spell over him of a long mental silence, as one might say, in which all definite thought expired, from which he aroused himself at last with a shrug of self-contempt, to find inexplicable tears in his eyes.  And just then an interruption came, not altogether unwelcome, in the greeting of a familiar voice.  It was Lightmark, who had discovered him in the course of a rapid walk down the Row, and had crossed over the small patch of intervening grass to make his salutations.

“I knew you by your back,” he remarked, after they had shaken hands—­“the ineffable languor of it; and, besides, who else but you would sit for choice on an October evening in such a wretched place?”

He looked down ruefully at his patent leather shoes, which the damp grass had dulled.

Rainham smiled vaguely; he needed an effort to pull himself together, to collect his energies sufficiently to meet the commonplace of conversation, after the curious detachment into which he had fallen; and he wondered aimlessly how long he had been there.

“I suppose, like everyone else, Dick,” he remarked after a while, “it is the weather which has brought you home at such an unfashionable date.”

“Yes,” answered Lightmark; “it was very poor fun yachting.  I shall stay in town altogether next year, I think.  And you—­you are not looking particularly fit; what have you done with yourself?”

“Oh, I am fit enough,” said Rainham lightly; “I have been in London, you see.”

“Well, I can’t let you go now you are here.  Won’t you dine with us?  Or rather—­no, I believe we dine out.  Come back and have some tea; Eve will be enchanted.  I really decline to sit in that puddle.”

Rainham rose slowly.

“Perhaps I will,” he said.  “I would have called before, if I had thought there was the least chance of finding you.  And how do things go?”