refusal to receive me. This is not only very shocking, as precluding the possibility of my offering either the warnings or consolations of religion to the invalid; but it injuriously affects my position with my parishioners, who, seeing me thus slighted by the principal landowner in the parish, show a painful disposition to treat my ministrations with levity, and my person with disrespect. I trust to your sense of justice to obtain my admittance to the sickroom, both in the interests of your uncle's eternal welfare and in those of the Church, of which I am a humble, but, I trust, efficient minister.—I have the honour to remain, dear Sir, yours obediently, Dear Sir "Walter Samuel Beal." Walter Samuel Beal Laurence finished his glass of claret and his cigarette with a smile. He sat a minute or two, gazing at the dancing, golden figures and at the rather malign loveliness of the orchids. "Poor little Padre Sahib!" he said to himself. "I'll go and see him to-morrow and do my best to quiet his worthy conscience. Funny mixture of soul and of self in that letter! But he's very much too mild a Daniel to fling into the lion's den upstairs. He little imagines what he's asking. Well, he won't get it anyhow, so that doesn't much matter. Pah!—how hot this room is!" Laurence rose from the table, folded up the letter, and put it in his pocket. "Now for processes of vivisection. It's the most original fashion of paying succession duty I ever heard of. My word, if I ever do come into possession, won't I just open the windows in this house!" V The conversation that evening did not move very smoothly. Laurence brought all the good temper and practical philosophy at his command into play. But the elder man was captious. His blank scepticism, his keen, unsparing statements jarred on his companion. An inclination towards revolt arose in Laurence. "I am half afraid, sir," he permitted himself to say at last, while his eyes rested on the gleaming breasts of the ebony sphinxes,—"that we have made a radical mistake and put the cart before the horse. To understand the average man, and his relation to things in general, must not you begin with the study of the average woman? Is not cherchez la femme, after all, the keynote of our inquiry?" Mr. Rivers raised his thin hand
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