views as to the deep machinations of Great Britain, and the illegality
of her position in Egypt. Mr. Belmont was an iron-grey, sturdy
Irishman, famous as an astonishingly good long-range rifle-shot, who had
carried off nearly every prize which Wimbledon or Bisley had to offer.
With him was his wife, a very charming and refined woman, full of the
pleasant playfulness of her country. Mrs. Shlesinger was a middle-aged
widow, quiet and soothing, with her thoughts all taken up by her
six-year-old child, as a mother's thoughts are likely to be in a boat
which has an open rail for a bulwark. The Reverend John Stuart was a
Nonconformist minister from Birmingham--either a Presbyterian or a
Congregationalist--a man of immense stoutness, slow and torpid in his
ways, but blessed with a considerable fund of homely humour, which made
him, I am told, a very favourite preacher, and an effective speaker from
advanced Radical platforms.

Finally, there was Mr. James Stephens, a Manchester solicitor (junior
partner of Hickson, Ward, and Stephens), who was travelling to shake off
the effects of an attack of influenza. Stephens was a man who, in the
course of thirty years, had worked himself up from cleaning the firm's
windows to managing its business. For most of that long time he had
been absolutely immersed in dry, technical work, living with the one
idea of satisfying old clients and attracting new ones, until his mind
and soul had become as formal and precise as the laws which he
expounded. A fine and sensitive nature was in danger of being as warped
as a busy city man's is liable to become. His work had become an
engrained habit, and, being a bachelor, he had hardly an interest in
life to draw him away from it, so that his soul was being gradually
bricked up like the body of a mediaeval nun. But at last there came
this kindly illness, and Nature hustled James Stephens out of his
groove, and sent him into the broad world far away from roaring