“I shall be very pleased to see you,” I replied.  “We are going out to dinner this evening, but I shall be at home and disengaged till about seven.”

“Thank you very much.  Then I shall do myself the pleasure of calling upon you about six o’clock.  Till then, farewell!” A graceful wave of the hand, and my unknown friend had disappeared round the corner of the street.

Now at last, I thought, something is going to happen in my uneventful life—­something to break the monotony of existence.  Of course, he must have inquired my name—­he could get that from any of the cathedral vergers—­and, as he said, he had observed whereabouts in the close I lived.  What is he coming to see me for?  I wondered.  I spent the rest of the afternoon in making the wildest surmises.  I was castle-building in Spain at a furious rate.  At one time I imagined that this faithful son of the church—­as he appeared to me—­was going to build and endow a grand cathedral in Australia on condition that I should be appointed dean at a yearly stipend of, say, ten thousand pounds.  Or perhaps, I said to myself, he will beg me to accept a sum of money—­I never thought of it as less than a thousand pounds—­as a slight recognition of and tribute to my remarkable vocal ability.

I took a long, lonely walk into the country to correct these ridiculous fancies and to steady my mind, and when I reached home and had refreshed myself with a quiet cup of afternoon tea, I felt I was morally and physically prepared for my interview with the opulent stranger.

Punctually as the cathedral clock struck six there was a ring at the visitor’s bell.  In a moment or two my unknown friend was shown into the drawing-room, which he entered with the easy air of a man of the world.  I noticed he was carrying a small black bag.

“How do you do again, Mr. Dale?” he said as though we were old acquaintances; “you see I have come sharp to my time.”

“Yes,” I answered, “and I am pleased to see you; do sit down.”  He sank into my best armchair, and placed his bag on the floor beside him.

“Since we met in the afternoon,” he said, “I have written a letter to your dean, expressing the great pleasure I felt in listening to your choir, and at the same time I inclosed a five-pound note, which I begged him to divide among the choir boys and men, from Alexander Poulter, Esq., of Poulter’s Pills.  You have of course heard of the world-renowned Poulter’s Pills.  I am Poulter!”

Poulter of Poulter’s Pills!  My heart sank within me!  A five-pound note!  My airy castles were tottering!

“I also sent him a couple of hundred of my pamphlets, which I said I trusted he would be so kind as to distribute in the close.”

I was aghast!

“And now, with regard to the special object of my call, Mr. Dale.  If you will allow me to say so, you are not making the most of that grand voice of yours; you are hidden under an ecclesiastical bushel here—­lost to the world.  You are wasting your vocal strength and sweetness on the desert air, so to speak.  Why, if I may hazard a guess, I don’t suppose you make five hundred a year here, at the outside?”