thing upon the pedestal suddenly declared itself, leaping out of the darkness into light.  It was a terrible object, a monstrosity of indeterminate sex and nature, but surmounted by a woman’s head and face of extraordinary, if devilish loveliness, sunk back between high but grotesquely small shoulders, like to those of a lizard, so that it glared upwards.  The workmanship of the thing was rude yet strangely powerful.  Whatever there is cruel, whatever there is devilish, whatever there is inhuman in the dark places of the world, shone out of the jewelled eyes which were set in that yellow female face, yellow because its substance was of gold, a face which seemed not to belong to the embryonic legs beneath, for body there was none, but to float above them.  A hollow, life-sized mask with two tiny frog-like legs, that was the fashion of it.

“You are an ugly brute,” muttered Sir Robert, contemplating this effigy, “but although I believe in nothing in heaven above or earth below, except the abysmal folly of the British public, I am bothered if I don’t believe in you.  At any rate from the day when Vernon brought you into my office, my luck turned, and to judge from the smile on your sweet countenance, I don’t think it is done with yet.  I wonder what those stones are in your eyes.  Opals, I suppose, from the way they change colour.  They shine uncommonly to-day, I never remember them so bright.  I——­”

At this moment a knock came on the door.  Sir Robert turned off the lamp and walked back to the fireplace.

“Come in,” he said, and as he spoke once more his pale face grew impassive and expressionless.

The door opened and a clerk entered, an imposing-looking clerk with iron-grey hair, who wore an irreproachable frock coat and patent leather boots.  Advancing to his master, he stood respectfully silent, waiting to be addressed.  For quite a long while Sir Robert looked over his head as though he did not see him; it was a way of his.  Then his eyes rested on the man dreamily and he remarked in his cold, clear voice: 

“I don’t think I rang, Jeffreys.”

“No, Sir Robert,” answered the clerk, bowing as though he spoke to Royalty, “but there is a little matter about that article in The Cynic.”

“Press business,” said Sir Robert, lifting his eyebrows; “you should know by this time that I do not attend to such details.  See Mr. Champers-Haswell, or Major Vernon.”

“They are both out at the moment, Sir Robert.”

“Go on, then, Jeffreys,” replied the head of the firm with a resigned sigh, “only be brief.  I am thinking.”

The clerk bowed again.

“The Cynic people have just telephoned through about that article we sent them.  I think you saw it, sir, and you may remember it begins——­” and he read from a typewritten copy in his hand which was headed “Sahara Limited”: