The young man, who, at the end of September, 1924, dismounted from a taxicab in South Square, Westminster, was so unobtrusively American that his driver had some hesitation in asking for double his fare. The young man had no hesitation in refusing it.

“Are you unable to read?” he said, softly. “Here’s four shillings.”

With that he turned his back and looked at the house before which he had descended. This, the first private English house he had ever proposed to enter, inspired him with a certain uneasiness, as of a man who expects to part with a family ghost. Comparing a letter with the number chased in pale brass on the door, he murmured: “It surely is,” and rang the bell.

While waiting for the door to be opened, he was conscious of extreme quietude, broken by a clock chiming four as if with the voice of Time itself. When the last boom died, the door yawned inward, and a man, almost hairless, said:

“Yes, sir?”

The young man removed a soft hat from a dark head.

“This is Mrs. Michael Mont’s house?”

“Correct, sir.”

“Will you give her my card, and this letter?”

“‘Mr. Francis Wilmot, Naseby, S. C.’ Will you wait in here, sir?”

Ushered through the doorway of a room on the right, Francis Wilmot was conscious of a commotion close to the ground, and some teeth grazing the calf of his leg.

“Dandie!” said the voice of the hairless man, “you little devil! That dog is a proper little brute with strangers, sir. Stand still! I’ve known him bite clean through a lady’s stockings.”

Francis Wilmot saw with interest a silver-grey dog nine inches high and nearly as broad, looking up at him with lustrous eyes above teeth of extreme beauty.