The exhausted London to which David Williams had
returned a few days previously had lost a few thousands of its
West-end and City population--just, in fact, most of its interesting
if unlikable folk, its people who mattered, its insolent spoilt
darlings whom you liked to recognize in the Carlton atrium, in Hyde
Park, in a box at the theatre: yet the frowsy, worthy millions were
there all the same. The air of its then smelly streets was used up
and had the ammoniac strench of the stable. It was a weary London.
The London actors had not returned from Cornwall and Switzerland.
Provincial companies enjoyed--a little anxiously owing to uncertain
receipts at the box office--a brief license on the boards of famous
play-houses. The newspapers had exhausted the stunt of the silly
season and were at their flattest and most yawn-provoking. The South
African War had reached its dreariest stage....
Bertie Adams on this close September evening had out-stayed the
other employes of _Fraser and Warren_ in their fifth floor office at
No. 88-90 Chancery Lane. He had remained after office hours to do a
little work, a little "self-improvement"; and he was just about to
close the outer office and leave the key with the housekeeper, when
the lift came surging up and out of it stepped a young man in a
summer suit and a bowler hat who, to Bertie's astonishment, not only
dashed straight at the door of the partners' room, but opened its
Yale lock with a latch-key as though long accustomed to do so.
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