What a loss would she be to Mr. Carrel Quire! Nevertheless she was
capable of being foolish. It was her foolishness that had transferred
her from Mr. Carrel Quire to himself.


III

Mr. Prohack went out because he was drawn out, by the force of an
attraction which he would scarcely avow even to himself,--a mysterious
and horrible attraction which, if he had been a logical human being like
the rest of us, ought to have been a repulsion for him.

And as he was walking abroad in the pleasant foggy sunshine of the West
End streets, a plutocratic idler with nothing to do but yield to strange
impulses, he saw on a motor-bus the placard of a financial daily paper
bearing the line: "The Latest Oil Coup." He immediately wanted to buy
that paper. As a London citizen he held the opinion that whenever he
wanted a thing he ought to be able to buy it at the next corner. Yet now
he looked in every direction but could see no symptom of a newspaper
shop anywhere. The time was morning--for the West End it was early
morning--and there were newsboys on the pavements, but by a curious
anomaly they were selling evening and not morning newspapers. Daringly
he asked one of these infants for the financial daily; the infant
sniggered and did no more. Another directed him to a shop up an alley
off the Edgware Road. The shopman doubted the existence of any such
financial daily as Mr. Prohack indicated, apparently attaching no
importance to the fact that it was advertised on every motor-bus
travelling along the Edgware Road, but he suggested that if it did
exist, it might just conceivably be purchased at the main bookstall at
Paddington Station. Determined to obtain the paper at all costs, Mr.