air then. I was drawn into it, carried away by my subject. Perhaps I let
it do so because it was so little familiar to my lines of thought. It
was fresh ground and I revelled in it. I committed myself to that kind
of emotional, lyrical outburst that one dislikes so much on re-reading.
I was half conscious of the fact, but I ignored it.

The thunderstorm was over, and there was a moist sparkling freshness in
the air when I hurried with my copy to the _Hour_ office in the Avenue
de l'Opéra. I wished to be rid of it, to render impossible all chance of
revision on the morrow.

I wanted, too, to feel elated; I expected it. It was a right. At the
office I found the foreign correspondent, a little cosmopolitan Jew
whose eyebrows began their growth on the bridge of his nose. He was
effusive and familiar, as the rest of his kind.

"Hullo, Granger," was his greeting. I was used to regarding myself as
fallen from a high estate, but I was not yet so humble in spirit as to
relish being called Granger by a stranger of his stamp. I tried to
freeze him politely.

"Read your stuff in the _Hour_," was his rejoinder; "jolly good I call
it. Been doing old Red-Beard? Let's have a look. Yes, yes. That's the
way--that's the real thing--I call it. Must have bored you to death ...
old de Mersch I mean. I ought to have had the job, you know. My
business, interviewing people in Paris. But _I_ don't mind. Much rather
you did it than I. You do it a heap better."

I murmured thanks. There was a pathos about the sleek little man--a
pathos that is always present in the type. He seemed to be trying to