“It’s very kind of you to have come to see me, Ellerton,” I said, “but if I don’t call yet awhile to pay my respects to your wife, I hope you’ll understand, and not attribute it to discourtesy.”

I have never seen relief so clearly depicted on a human countenance.  He drew a long breath and instinctively passed his handkerchief over his forehead.  Then he grasped my hand.

“My dear fellow,” he cried, “of course we’ll understand.  It was a shocking affair—­terrible for you.  My wife and I were quite bowled over by it.”

I did not attempt to clear myself.  What was the use?  Every man denies these things as a matter of course, and as a matter of course nobody believes him.

Once I ran across Elphin Montgomery, a mysterious personage behind many musical comedy enterprises.  He is jewelled all over like a first-class Hindoo idol, and is treated as a god in fashionable restaurants, where he entertains riff-raff at sumptuous banquets.  I had some slight acquaintance with the fellow, but he greeted me as though I were a long lost intimate—­his heavy sensual face swagged in smiles—­and invited me to a supper party.  I declined with courtesy and walked away in fury.  He would not have presumed to ask me to meet his riff-raff before I became disgustingly and I suppose to some minds, fascinatingly, notorious.  But now I was hail-fellow-well-met with him, a bird of his own feather, a rogue of his own kidney, to whom he threw open the gates of his bediamonded and befrilled Alsatia.  A pestilential fellow!  As if I would mortgage my birthright for such a mess of pottage.

So I stiffened and bade Society high and low go packing.  I would neither seek mine own people, nor allow myself to be sought by Elphin Montgomery’s.  I enwrapped myself in a fine garment of defiance.  My sister Jane, who was harder and more worldly-minded than Agatha, would have had me don a helmet of brass and a breastplate of rhinoceros hide and force my way through reluctant portals; but Agatha agreed with me, clinging, however, to the hope that time would not only reconcile Society to me, but would also reconcile me to Society.

“If the hope comforts you, my dear Agatha,” said I, “by all means cherish it.  In the meantime, allow me to observe that the character of Ishmael is eminently suited to the profession of tax-collecting.”

During these early days of my return the one person with whom I had no argument was Lola.  She soothed where others scratched, and stimulated where others goaded.  The intimacy of my convalescence continued.  At first I acquainted her, as far as was reasonably necessary, with my change of fortune, and accepted her offer to find me less expensive quarters.  The devoted woman personally inspected every flat in London, with that insistence of which masculine patience is incapable, and eventually decided on a tiny bachelor suite somewhere in the clouds over a block of flats in Victoria Street where the service is included in