“Not since they were at Enton.  I dare say he has never even thought of her since.  Still, it was a contingency which occurred to me.”

“He is a young man of excellent principles,” Lord Arranmore said, dryly, “taking life as seriously as you please, and I should imagine is too well balanced to make anything but a very safe husband.  If he comes to me, if he will accept it without coming to me even, he can have another ten thousand a year and Enton.”

“You are generous,” she murmured.

“Generous!  My houses and my money are a weariness to me.  I cannot live in the former, and I cannot spend the latter.  I am a man really of simple tastes.  Besides, there is no glory now in spending money.  One can so easily be outdone by one’s grocer, or one of those marvellous Americans.”

“Yet I thought I read of you last week as giving nine hundred pounds for some unknown tapestry at Christie’s.”

“But that is not extravagance,” he protested.  “That is not even spending money.  It is exchanging one investment for another.  The purple colouring of that tapestry is marvellous.  The next generation will esteem it priceless.”

“You must go?” she asked, for he had risen.

“I have stayed long enough,” he answered.  “In another five minutes you will yawn, and mine would have been a wasted visit.  I should like to time my visits always so that the five minutes which I might have stayed seem to you the most desirable five minutes of the whole time.”

“You are an epicurean and a schemer,” she declared.  “I am afraid of you.”

* * * * *

He bought an evening paper on his way to St. James’s Square, and leaning back in his brougham, glanced it carelessly through.  Just as he was throwing it aside a small paragraph at the bottom of the page caught his attention.

A novel philanthropic departure.

The first bureau opened to-day.

Interview with Mr. Kingston Brooks.

He folded the paper out, and read through every line carefully.  A few minutes after his arrival home he re-issued from the house in a bowler hat and a long, loose overcoat.  He took the Metropolitan and an omnibus to Stepney, and read the paragraph through again.  Soon he found himself opposite the address given.

He recognized it with a little start.  It had once been a mission hall, then a furniture shop, and later on had been empty for years.  It was brilliantly lit up, and he pressed forward and peered through the window.  Inside the place was packed.  Brooks and a dozen or so others were sitting on a sort of slightly-raised platform at the end of the room, with a desk in front of each of them.  Lord Arranmore pulled his hat over his eyes and forced his way just inside.  Almost as he entered Brooks rose to his feet.

“Look here,” he said, “you all come up asking the same question and wasting my time answering you all severally.  You want to know what this place means.  Well, if you’ll stay just where you are for a minute, I’ll tell you all together, and save time.”