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without encumbrances, as the advertisements say, no relations to worry you, with plenty of money, let alone what you make by writing, and yet you are not happy. What is the matter with you?”

      “Well, you should know best What’s the good of your being a doctor, and acquainted all these years with my moral and physical constitution (what there is of it), if you can’t tell what’s the nature of my complaint?”

      “I don’t diagnose many cases like yours, old boy, down by the side of the water, among the hardy patients of Mundy & Barton, general practitioners. There is plenty of human nature there!”

      “And do you mean to stay there with Mundy much longer?”

      “Well, I don’t know. A fellow is really doing some good, and it is a splendid practice for mastering surgery. They are always falling off roofs, or having weights fall on them, or getting jammed between barges, or kicking each other into most interesting jellies. Then the foreign sailors are handy with their knives. Altogether, a man learns a good deal about surgery in Chelsea. But, I say,” Barton went on, lowering his voice, “where on earth did you pick up——?”

      Here he glanced significantly at a tall man, standing at some distance, the centre of half a dozen very youthful revellers.

      “Cranley, do you mean? I met him at the Trumpet office. He was writing about the Coolie Labor Question and the Eastern Question. He has been in the South Seas, like you.”

      “Yes; he has been in a lot of queerer places than the South Seas,” answered the other, “and he ought to know something about Coolies. He has dealt in them, I fancy.”

      “I daresay,” Maitland replied rather wearily. “He seems to have travelled a good deal: perhaps he has travelled in Coolies, whatever they may be.”

      “Now, my dear fellow, do you know what kind of man your guest is, or don’t you?”

      “He seems to be a military and sporting kind of gent, so to speak,” said Maitland; “but what does it matter?”

      “Then you don’t know why he left his private tutor’s; you don’t know why he left the University; you don’t know why he left the Ninety-second; you don’t know, and no one does, what he did after that; and you never heard of that affair with the Frenchman in Egypt?”

      “Well,” Maitland replied, “about his ancient history I own I don’t know anything. As to the row with the Frenchman at Cairo, he told me himself. He said the beggar was too small for him to lick, and that duelling was ridiculous.”

      “They didn’t take that view of it at Shephard’s Hotel”

      “Well, it is not my affair,” said Maitland. “One should see all sort of characters, Bielby says. This is not an ordinary fellow. Why, he has been a sailor before the mast, he says, by way of adventure, and he is full of good stories. I rather like him, and he can’t do my moral character any harm. I’m not likely to deal in Coolies, at my time of life, nor quarrel with warlike aliens.”

      “No; but he’s not a good man to introduce to these boys from Oxford,” Barton was saying, when the subject of their conversation came up, surrounded by his little court of undergraduates.

      The Hon. Thomas Cranley was a good deal older than the company in which he found himself. Without being one of the hoary youths who play Falstaff to every fresh heir’s Prince Harry, he was a middle-aged man, too obviously accustomed to the society of boys. His very dress spoke of a prolonged youth. À large cat’s-eye, circled with diamonds, blazed solitary in his shirt-front, and his coat was cut after the manner of the contemporary reveller. His chin was clean shaven, and his face, though a good deal worn, was ripe, smooth, shining with good cheer, and of a purply bronze hue, from exposure to hot suns and familiarity with the beverages of many peoples. His full red lips, with their humorous corners, were shaded by a small black mustache, and his twinkling bistre-colored eyes, beneath mobile black eyebrows, gave Cranley the air of a jester and a good fellow. In manner he was familiar, with a kind of deference, too, and reserve, “like a dog that is always wagging his tail and deprecating a kick,” thought Barton grimly, as he watched the other’s genial advance.

      “He’s going to say good-night, bless him,” thought Maitland gratefully. “Now the others will be moving too, I hope!”

      So Maitland rose with much alacrity as Cranley approached him. To stand up would show, he thought, that he was not inhospitably eager to detain the parting guest.

      “Good-night, Mr. Maitland,” said the senior, holding out his hand.

      “It is still early,” said the host, doing his best to play his part. “Must you really go?”

      “Yes; the night’s young” (it was about half-past twelve), “but I have a kind of engagement to look in at the Cockpit, and three or four of your young friends here are anxious to come with me, and see how we keep it up round there. Perhaps you and your friend will walk with us.” Here he bowed slightly in the direction of Barton.

      “There will be a little bac going on,” he continued—“un petit bac de santé; and these boys tell me they have never played anything more elevating than loo.”

      “I’m afraid I am no good at a round game,” answered Maitland, who had played at his Aunt’s at Christmas, and who now observed with delight that everyone was moving; “but here is Barton, who will be happy to accompany you, I daresay.”

      “If you’re for a frolic, boys,” said Barton, quoting Dr. Johnson, and looking rather at the younger men than at Cranley, “why, I will not balk you. Good-night, Maitland.”

      And he shook hands with his host.

      “Good-nights” were uttered in every direction; sticks, hats, and umbrellas were hunted up; and while Maitland, half-asleep, was being whirled to his rooms in Bloomsbury in a hansom, his guests made the frozen pavement of Piccadilly ring beneath their elegant heels.

      “It is only round the corner,” said Cranley to the four or five men who accompanied him. “The Cockpit, where I am taking you, is in a fashionable slum off St. James’s. We’re just there.”

      There was nothing either meretricious or sinister in the aspect of that favored resort, the Cockpit, as the Decade Club was familiarly called by its friends—and enemies. Two young Merton men and the freshman from New, who were enjoying their Christmas vacation in town, and had been dining with Maitland, were a little disappointed in the appearance of the place. They had hoped to knock mysteriously at a back door in a lane, and to be shown, after investigating through a loopholed wicket, into a narrow staircase, which, again, should open on halls of light, full of blazing wax candles and magnificent lacqueys, while a small mysterious man would point out the secret hiding-room, and the passages leading on to the roof or into the next house, in case of a raid by the police. Such was the old idea of a “Hell;” but the advance of Thought has altered all these early notions. The Decade Club was like any other small club. A current of warm air, charged with tobacco-smoke, rushed forth into the frosty night when the swinging door was opened; a sleepy porter looked out of his little nest, and Cranley wrote the names of the companions he introduced in a book which was kept for that purpose.

      “Now you are free of the Cockpit for the night,” he said, genially. “It’s a livelier place, in the small hours, than that classical Olympic we’ve just left.”

      They went upstairs, passing the doors of one or two rooms, lit up but empty, except for two or three men who were sleeping in uncomfortable attitudes on sofas. The whole of the breadth of the first floor, all the drawing-room of the house before it became a club, had been turned into a card-room, from which brilliant lights, voices, and a heavy odor of tobacco and alcohol poured out when the door was opened. A long green baize-covered table, of very light wood, ran down the centre of the room, while refreshments stood on smaller tables, and a servant out of livery sat, half-asleep, behind a great desk in the remotest corner. There were several empty chairs round the green baize-covered table, at which some twenty men were sitting,

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