‘Play me the Chopin Fantasie, will you.  I feel like it.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said Simon, and paused.  ’Which particular one do you desire me to render, sir?’

‘There is only one, Shawn, for piano solo.’

‘I beg pardon, sir.’

The gentle plashing of water mingled with the strains of one of the greatest of all musical compositions, as interpreted by Simon Shawn with the aid of an ingenious contrivance the patentees of which had spent twenty thousand pounds in advertising it.

‘Very good, Shawn,’ said Shawn’s master, coming forward in his shirt-sleeves as the last echoes of a mighty chord expired under the dome.  He meditatively stroked his graying beard while the pianist returned to the tea-tray.

‘And, Shawn—­’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I want a hat.’

‘A hat, sir?’

‘A lady’s hat.’

‘Yes, sir.’

’Run down into Department 42, there’s a good fellow, and see if you can find me a lady’s hat of dark-blue straw, wide brim, trimmed chiefly with a garland of pinkish rosebuds.’

’A lady’s hat of dark-blue straw, wide brim, trimmed chiefly with pinkish rosebuds, sir?’

‘Precisely.  Here, you’re forgetting the token.’

He detached a gold medallion from his watch-chain, and handed it to Shawn, who departed with it and with the tea-tray.

Two minutes later, having climbed the staircase between the inner and outer domes, he stood, fully clad in a light-gray suit, on the highest platform of the immense building, whose occidental facade is the glory of Sloane Street and one of the marvels of the metropolis.  Far above him a gigantic flag spread its dazzling folds to the sun and the breeze.  On the white ground of the flag, in purple letters seven feet high, was traced the single word, ‘Hugo.’

From his eyrie he could see half the West End of London.  Sloane Street stretched north and south like a ruled line, and along that line two hurrying processions of black dots approached each other, and met and vanished below him; they constituted the first division of his army of three thousand five hundred employes.

He leaned over the balustrade, and sniffed the pure air with exultant, eager nostrils.  He was forty-six.  He did not feel forty-six, however.  In common with every man of forty-six, and especially every bachelor of forty-six, he regarded forty-six as a mere meaningless number, as a futile and even misleading symbol of chronology.  He felt that Time had made a mistake—­that he was not really in the fifth decade, and that his true, practical working age was about thirty.

Moreover, he was in love, for the first time in his life.  Like all men and all women, he had throughout the whole of his adult existence been ever secretly preoccupied with thoughts, hopes, aspirations, desires, concerning the other sex, but the fundamental inexperience of his heart was such that he imagined he was going to be happy because he had fallen in love.