“Exactly,” said the Duke coldly, “the Duchess and I have realised that it is we who provide the material out of which this great far-reaching industry has been built up.  Widespread employment will be given and enormous profits made during the duration of the case, and we, on whom all the stress and racket falls, will get—­what?  An unenviable notoriety and the privilege of paying heavy legal expenses whichever way the verdict goes.  Hence our decision to strike.  We don’t wish to be reconciled; we fully realise that it is a grave step to take, but unless we get some reasonable consideration out of this vast stream of wealth and industry that we have called into being we intend coming out of court and staying out.  Good afternoon.”

The news of this latest strike spread universal dismay.  Its inaccessibility to the ordinary methods of persuasion made it peculiarly formidable.  If the Duke and Duchess persisted in being reconciled the Government could hardly be called on to interfere.  Public opinion in the shape of social ostracism might be brought to bear on them, but that was as far as coercive measures could go.  There was nothing for it but a conference, with powers to propose liberal terms.  As it was, several of the foreign witnesses had already departed and others had telegraphed cancelling their hotel arrangements.

The conference, protracted, uncomfortable, and occasionally acrimonious, succeeded at last in arranging for a resumption of litigation, but it was a fruitless victory.  The Duke, with a touch of his earlier precocity, died of premature decay a fortnight before the date fixed for the new trial.

THE ROMANCERS

It was autumn in London, that blessed season between the harshness of winter and the insincerities of summer; a trustful season when one buys bulbs and sees to the registration of one’s vote, believing perpetually in spring and a change of Government.

Morton Crosby sat on a bench in a secluded corner of Hyde Park, lazily enjoying a cigarette and watching the slow grazing promenade of a pair of snow-geese, the male looking rather like an albino edition of the russet-hued female.  Out of the corner of his eye Crosby also noted with some interest the hesitating hoverings of a human figure, which had passed and repassed his seat two or three times at shortening intervals, like a wary crow about to alight near some possibly edible morsel.  Inevitably the figure came to an anchorage on the bench, within easy talking distance of its original occupant.  The uncared-for clothes, the aggressive, grizzled beard, and the furtive, evasive eye of the new-comer bespoke the professional cadger, the man who would undergo hours of humiliating tale-spinning and rebuff rather than adventure on half a day’s decent work.

For a while the new-comer fixed his eyes straight in front of him in a strenuous, unseeing gaze; then his voice broke out with the insinuating inflection of one who has a story to retail well worth any loiterer’s while to listen to.