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manner in which he piloted her into the hotel and bullied the girl in the office into allotting her the best available room on the first floor.

Hotel life was no novelty for Patricia. Consequently, she was neither embarrassed nor offended when the two commercial travellers, with whom she sat at a small table at dinner that evening, behaved after the manner of their kind in the presence of a beautiful stranger of the opposite sex.

With the ease of manner and practised politeness of true knights of the road, they were unobtrusively attentive to her wants, and, at the right moment, introduced each other by name. Patricia gave hers in exchange.

Patricia had met men of the road often during her business career. She knew their vanities and their virtues, their unquenchable optimism and their failings. She liked them as a class. They were such overgrown boys; so full of life and the knowledge of life. Little as she felt in the mood for life and cheery company, she would have felt convicted of the snobbishness she detested had she not responded in some degree to their attentions.

She sat between them on a chesterfield in the lounge after dinner, drinking coffee and meditatively smoking a cigarette as they exchanged reminiscences of their roving lives—stories of laughable adventures by road and rail, mildly spiced with amorous moments in widely-scattered hostelries.

After all, she reasoned, this was better than sitting alone in one’s room and brooding on the imposible. Here, she might forget for a moment at least.

She accepted one of the three cocktails which one of the knights, Baden, had ordered on leaving the table. She found, somewhat to her surprise, that it did her good—“lightened the darkness,” as she phrased it obscurely to her new friends.

“We rather suspected the darkness,” smiled the other knight, one George. “You look rather peeked—washed-out, you know. Charity work?”