“A tiny, tiny bit, perhaps,” Gladys said, “but I’m not at all sure.  I can think of no one now but my father, so that if you value my good opinion, or really want to prove your devotion to me, you must, for the time being, devote yourself to him.  Who knows—­it may lie in your power to do him some service.”

“I don’t see how,” Shiel replied, somewhat despondingly.  “But no matter—­after you, your father and your father’s affairs shall be my first consideration.  You will let me see you sometimes, won’t you?”

“Sometimes,” Gladys laughed.  “Good-bye!  Don’t make any mistakes to-morrow.  Your performance to-night was not as good as usual.”  And, with this somewhat cruel remark, she stepped lightly into her motor, and drove off.

Shiel now gave way to despair.  There are few conditions in life so utterly unenviable as penury and love—­to be next door to starving, and at the same time in love.  Day after day Shiel, who was thus afflicted, had revelled in Gladys’s company, and had intoxicated himself with her beauty, fully aware that for each moment of pleasure there would, later on, be a corresponding moment of pain.  It was only in romance, he told himself, that the penniless lover suddenly finds himself in a position to marry—­in reality, his love suit is rejected with scorn; his adored one marries some one who has, or pretends he has, limitless wealth; and the despised swain ends his days a miserable and dejected bachelor.

All the same, Shiel determined that he would for once fare like the hero in romance—­that he would either win the object of his affections or perish in the attempt; and no sooner did the fit of the blues, consequent on the conversation just related, wear off, than he set to work in grim earnest to discover some means of breaking up the Modern Sorcery Company Ltd., and of restoring to the firm of Martin and Davenport their former prestige.

In the meanwhile, affairs were by no means stationary, as far as Hamar and his colleagues were concerned.  The appearance of their paper To-morrow, a morning journal, that chronicled faithfully every event of the following day, caused a tremendous sensation; and the sale of every other paper sank to nil—­no one, naturally, wanting to buy the news that had happened yesterday, when, for the same money, they could obtain news of what would happen that very day.  The stupid method of chronicling past events, Hamar announced in the first issue of his organ, was now obsolete.  It was, perhaps, good enough for the Victorian era, but it was utterly out of keeping with the present age of hourly progress.  Who, for instance, wanted to know that at 6 p.m., on the preceding evening, there had been a big fire in New York?  Was it not far more to the point for them to learn, for example, that at 2 p.m., on that very day, Rio de Janeiro would be partially destroyed by an earthquake; that the Post Office in King’s Road, Chelsea, would be broken into by thieves; that Nelson’s Monument