they were a particularly good-looking trio, and partly because they all
three came up from Winchester with great cricket reputations. Within
two years they were all playing for the 'Varsity' and one of them was
made captain.

Three years from the term of their leaving, after each had gone his own
way for a season, they gravitated together again, and finally became
established in the Cromwell Road flat, once more on the old
affectionate terms.

Dick Bruce was following a literary career, of a somewhat ambiguous
nature. He wrote weird articles for weird papers, under weird
pseudonyms, verses, under a woman's name, for women's papers, usually
of the _Home Dressmaker_ type; occasional lines to advertise some
patent medicine or soap; one or two Salvation Army hymns of a
particularly rousing nature: and sometimes a weighty, brilliant article
for a first-class paper, duly signed in his own name.

Besides all this he visited a publisher's office most days, where he
was supposed to be meditating the acquirement of a partnership. Hal
was very apt at terse, concise definitions, and she was quite up to her
best form when she described him as "the maddest of a mad clan run
amok."

Harold St. Quintin, or Quin, as every one called him, was idealist,
etherealist, and dreamer. His original intention had been to enter the
Church, but having gone down into East London to give six months to
slum work, he had remained two years without showing any inclination to
give it up. Sometimes he lived at the flat, and sometimes he was lost
for a week at a time somewhere east of St. Paul's, where one might as