and went toward the St. Cloud gardens, where the band was playing. For a
time Hagar did not stir, but idled with his pencil and notebook. Suddenly
he started, and hurried out in the direction Telford had gone.

"I was an ass," he said to himself, "not to think of that at first."

He entered the St. Cloud gardens and walked round the promenade a few
times, but without finding him. Presently, however, Alpheus Richmond,
whose beautiful and brilliant waistcoat and brass buttons with monogram
adorned showed advantageously in the morning sunshine, said to him: "I
say, Hagar, who's that chap up there filling the door of the summer house?
Lord, rather!"

It was Telford. Hagar wished for the slightest pretext to go up the
unfrequented side path and speak to him, but his mind was too excited to
do the thing naturally without a stout pretext. Besides, though he admired
the man's proportions and his uses from an artistic standpoint, he did not
like him personally, and he said that he never could. He had instinctive
likes and dislikes. What had startled him at the pump-room and had made
him come to the gardens was the conviction that this was the man to play
the part in the scene which, described by Mrs. Detlor, had been arranging
itself in a hundred ways in his brain during the night--the central
figures always the same, the details, light, tone, coloring, expression,
fusing, resolving. Then came another and still more significant thought.
On this he had acted.

When he had got rid of Richmond, who begged that he would teach him how to
arrange a tie as he did--for which an hour was appointed--he determined,
at all hazards, to speak. He had a cigar in his pocket, and though to
smoke in the morning was pain and grief to him, he determined to ask for a