At first sight this statement may seem contradictory. Is it possible, the captious critic may ask, for a person simultaneously to stand and pace the floor? The answer is Yes, if he or she is sufficiently agitated as to the soul. You do it by placing yourself on a given spot and scrabbling the feet alternately like a cat kneading a hearth-rug. It is sometimes the only method by which strong women can keep from having hysterics.

Mrs. Sigsbee H. Waddington was a strong woman. In fact, so commanding was her physique that a stranger might have supposed her to be one in the technical, or circus, sense. She was not tall, but had bulged so generously in every possible direction that, when seen for the first time, she gave the impression of enormous size. No theatre, however little its programme had managed to attract the public, could be said to be "sparsely filled" if Mrs. Waddington had dropped in to look at the show. Public speakers, when Mrs. Waddington was present, had the illusion that they were addressing most of the population of the United States. And when she went to Carlsbad or Aix-les-Bains to take the waters, the authorities huddled together nervously and wondered if there would be enough to go round.

Her growing bulk was a perpetual sorrow—one of many—to her husband. When he had married her, she had been slim and svelte. But she had also been the relict of the late P. Homer Horlick, the Cheese King, and he had left her several million dollars. Most of the interest accruing from this fortune she had, so it sometimes seemed to Sigsbee H. Waddington, spent on starchy foods.

Mrs. Waddington stood and paced the floor, and presently the door opened.

"Lord Hunstanton," announced Ferris, the butler.

The standard of male looks presented up to the present in this story has not been high: but the man who now entered did much to raise the average. He was tall and slight and elegant, with frank blue eyes—one of them preceded by an eye-glass—and one of those clipped moustaches. His clothes had been cut by an inspired tailor and pressed by a genius. His tie was simply an ethereal white butterfly, straight from heaven, that hovered over the collar-stud as if it were sipping pollen from some exotic flower. (George Finch, now working away at number eight and having just got it creased in four places, would have screamed hoarsely with envy at the sight of that tie.)

"Well, here I am," said Lord Hunstanton. He paused for a moment, then added, "What, what!" as if he felt that it 

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