of London as something that a schoolboy could understand at a glance.

Was it really idleness he longed for? He did not know why, but abruptly
his desire had changed. And he found himself wishing for events, tragic,
tremendous, horrible even--anything, if they were unusual, were such as
to set the man who was involved in them apart from his fellows. The
foreign element in him woke up, called, perhaps, from repose by the
unusually languid air, and London seemed meaningless to him, a city
where a man of his type could neither dream, nor act, with all the
languor, or all the energy, that was within him. And he imagined, as
sometimes clever children do, a distant country where all romances
unwind their shining coils, where he would find the incentive which he
needed to call all his secret powers--the powers whose exercise would
make his life complete--into supreme activity.

He gripped his horse with his knees. It understood his desire. It broke
into a canter. He passed in front of the garden of Stafford House,
turned to the left past St. James's Palace and Marlborough House, and
was soon at his own door.

"Please bring up the book with my coffee in twenty minutes, Henry," he
said to his servant, as he went in.

In half an hour he was seated in an arm-chair in an upstairs
sitting-room, sipping his coffee. The papers lay folded at his elbow.
Upon his knee, open, lay the book in which were written down the names
of the patients with whom he had made appointments that day.

He looked at them, seeking for one that promised interest. The first
patient was a man who would come in on his way to the city. Then