at dinner."

"You're quite right," Philip answered, with a deprecating look (as
who should say, aside, "I really couldn't help it"). "He--he's
rather in a difficulty." And then he went on to explain in a few
hurried words to Frida, with sundry shrugs and nods of profoundest
import, that the supposed lunatic or murderer or foreigner or fool
had gone to Miss Blake's without luggage of any sort; and that,
"Perhaps"--very dubitatively--"a portmanteau or bag might help him
out of his temporary difficulties."

"Why, of course," Frida cried impulsively, with prompt decision;
"Robert's Gladstone bag and my little brown trunk would be the very
things for him. I could lend them to him at once, if only we can
get a Sunday cab to take them."

"NOT before service, surely," Philip interposed, scandalised.
"If he were to take them now, you know, he'd meet all the church-
people."

"Is it taboo, then, to face the clergy with a Gladstone bag?"
Bertram asked quite seriously, in that childlike tone of simple
inquiry that Philip had noticed more than once before in him. "Your
bonzes object to meet a man with luggage? They think it unlucky?"

Frida and Philip looked at one another with quick glances, and
laughed.

"Well, it's not exactly tabooed," Frida answered gently; "and it's
not so much the rector himself, you know, as the feelings of one's