not far from Ludgate Hill; and furnished employment to the satirical whips of frowzy Sunday Juvenals and flippant Saturday Jeremiahs.

Down there, however, near the City, his name was not Beldover.

But, even upon its title-page, he confessed to the authorship of a clever, scurrilous, and peculiarly rancid novel, which had leapt into vogue within a fortnight of publication. Good, bad, and indifferent conspired to swell its astonishing sales. The good advertised it with their execrations; the bad had furnished it with types whose personality was scarcely veiled; and for both these reasons the indifferent read the book with voracity.

By the people whose words, deeds and manners he had with cynical treachery translated to its pages, Beldover had been neither cut nor kicked. For amongst the most notorious of his models were two of wit sufficient to refuse the cap of self-accusation, and of rank so exalted that their example ensured imitation.

"If they don't," said many smaller fry, "why the devil should I care?"

So the author of Hell's Delight went his ways, private and public, rejoicing.

Now this afternoon Alexander Beldover sat at the central

table with his back to the corner window. And the youngster opposite to him had a good view of the two men sitting there.

The other three had carried the talk into a region which happily had little interest for him, and during many minutes Alfred Corell languidly watched Bethune and Le Dane. And then, suddenly,

"I wish, Beldover," he said, leaning forward and speaking low, "you'd tell me who those two men are, lunching in the

corner.

Beldover was too old a bird to turn his head in a hurry "The table in the south window?" he asked.

Alfred Corell nodded.

I'll tell you in a moment, if I can."

A waiter passing, Beldover followed him with his eye, as if wishing to attract his attention. Having thus brought his gaze to the desired point, he turned at once, with apparent surprise at finding their own waiter changing the plates.

"The man on the left," he said, "is Bethune-The Mail calls him the 'Great Chinaman.'

life." "Never heard he had

"Then the other must be his son," said Corell, “—or his little brother. Never saw two men more alike in my "Didn't get him," said Beldover. either. But that's nothing. Wait a minute."

And when he had eaten awhile, he turned his head again with much appearance of unconcern.

"Good God!" he cried softly, coming back to his food. "You're right as to the likeness, Corell. It's astounding. But you're wrong about the relation. Bethune's not married." Mr Alfred Corell smiled, and felt sure he was going to say something good.

"I thought you were the lucky man," he drawled, "who wrote Hell's Delight?"

The two other young ones laughed. Even Beldover smiled approval.

"But it won't do, Corell," he said. "I know the other man too."

"Who is he?" asked Hackney Fyson; he sat on Beldover's left, and was nearest him in years.

Beldover controlled a grimace of distaste.

Le Dane-engineer-nephew of Lord Ingestow-son of Lady Blanche and Colonel Le Dane. He's on the committee.

"I've never seen him here," said Arthur Wringfield: he sat on Beldover's right.

"Always out of town," said Beldover.

Where does the likeness come from?" asked Wringfield; for both he and Hackney Fyson could see Anthony's table, without recourse to Beldover's devices.

"It isn't only their faces," said Hackney Fyson. "It's a pity you can't watch 'em, Beldover, without twisting your neck and looking silly. They handle their knives and forks and lift their glasses as if they'd been cut from the same pattern. They belong, somehow."

Wringfield repeated his question. from?" he demanded rhetorically.

"Oh, Lord!" exclaimed Beldover. Corell had brought off his bon mot;

now his turn.

"Lady-Lady Blanche," he said,

explain."

Where does it come

"Ask Him." Wringfield felt it was

"might be able to

"While Lady Blanche could," replied Beldover, "she wouldn't. If she's willing now, she can't."

"Why?" asked Fyson.

"She continues dead these twenty years," said Beldover. "Then perhaps," cried Corell, the Great Chinaman could tell us."

"I'd be sorry for the man that asked him," said Hackney Fyson, who had been watching the table in the south window, "whether he knows or not.'

'After all," said Wringfield, "it's rather rot. Any two men may happen to look alike.”

Corell had set the ball rolling, and did not wish to be deprived of his lead or his subject.

It's the kind of likeness that men give to their accidental rather than to their necessary offspring," he said sententiously; and so succeeded in keeping the ball from slipping over the edge of oblivion.

"You believe in the superstition of the love-child-its health, strength, beauty, and so on?" asked Beldover.

"I can't help believing," said Corell, very sage of counten

ance.

But I didn't know he was famous for his greater resemblance to his parents," said Beldover.

"He has it-whether he's famous for it or not," replied Corell. "I'll tell you a story."

He told it a story which had no weight but the conviction which its solitary evidence carried to the mind of the teller; a story without merit or decency.

Meantime Beldover had looked behind him once or twice with less caution than at first.

For in this one morning he had received news from his publishers good even beyond his expectations; and also a bundle of notices from a press-cutting agency. Some ten or fifteen in number, they differed in little but their choice of abusive epithets for the author and the matter of Hell's Delight. The wine, too, was good, or he would have been more sparing of it; and he sat among flatterers. It is therefore not surprising that Beldover was happy. And it was only when Beldover was happy that he forgot his caution. "There's a man at that middle table keeps turning to look at us," said Bethune.

Anthony smiled.

You must expect to be stared at," he replied. You're supposed to like it, you know."

Bethune shrugged his shoulders.

The man with his back to us? He's called Beldoverno credit to the club, I'm afraid," Anthony answered; and gave some account of the man he disliked and his book that he had not read.

These two had aroused by their likeness more curiosity in Beldover than he allowed the men at his table to perceive. He waited until Anthony and Bethune left the dining-room; then, getting free from his satellites, he walked through the Strand to Fleet Street. On his way he turned into Somerset House and found out some things that he wanted to know. Feeling blindly after more knowledge of the only kind he cared for, he continued his walk eastward, and was soon closeted with a hoary journalist of wonderful memory and great capacity for whisky. From this man his gleanings were better than he had dared to expect.

Anthony was not peculiar in his dislike of Alexander Beldover. But Beldover was almost alone in his hatred of Anthony Le Dane. Hitherto he had found no evil to whisper nor even to chew upon in secret against the man he had called prig, while groaning inwardly that this should be the worst word which he could fling with any colour in it of plausibility.

But now he thought there might be found (with a little more of such luck as he had had to-day) a worse, or, at least, a more painful epithet which could be some day whispered to sting.

And so, because he loved the discovery even more than the knowledge of evil, and because he was very far from loving Anthony Le Dane, Beldover became a power in Anthony's story.

THE

CHAPTER XIII

THE BALL ROLLS

THE facts which Beldover discovered, though not all in one afternoon, were these:-that Anthony Le Dane was born on the twenty-ninth of February in the year 1881; that Colonel Le Dane had died in the August of 1880; that Lady Blanche Le Dane had spent the winter and spring of that year 1880 in a hired villa upon the Eastern Italian Riviera. The name of the little town was Porto Finaggio, a place of great seclusion, left out at sea, as it were, by the railway and the Cornice Road, and joined with the neighbouring towns by nothing better than mule-tracks. From the hoary journalist, moreover, he picked up a thread leading to a discovery which gave weight to all the others: which was, that The Illustrated Examiner, a paper now defunct, had in the summer of 1880 sent Randolph Bethune to South Africa as war correspondent and black-and-white artist. He was remembered because of his present fame and because of the commotion which his telegrams and letters had occasioned both before and after Majuba. And one of those who remembered these things spoke casually of the trouble they had had to get the man when they wanted him.

He had been wandering afoot in strange shoes, when he had any, and afloat in stranger craft for almost a year, in the by-ways and obscure places of the Mediterranean; and had turned up at last in the little Riviera town of Santa Caterina, which he had not seemed so willing to leave as most men would have been at the prospect of good work.

When he heard this, Beldover went home, took down an atlas, and found that Santa Caterina lay at once upon the sea and the railway, some forty miles to the west of Spezzia, and four to the east and north of Porto Finaggio. He had learned, moreover, that it was upon or about the first day of June in 1880, that Randolph Bethune had reached the office of The Illustrated Examiner, having left Santa Caterina and his aimless wanderings in response to a telegraphic ultimatum from the editor.