He went into the office of the Special News Agency and found himself in a room where half-a-dozen girls were typewriting. They were making manifold copies of the hundred and one events that the Special News Agency "covered" with its Beavers, and supplied at a fixed annual rate to the newspapers. The Special News Agency were, so to speak, wholesale dealers in news. You bought the reports of Ministers' speeches or out-of-the-way lawsuits by the column. It was the same principle that governed the Easterham Gazette and its columns of stereo. No newspaper could afford a sufficiently large staff of reporters to cover everything. So the Special News Agency had its corps of verbatim shorthand writers, its representatives in every small village, and in every police-court. There was, of course, no room for the play of imagination or fantasy or style in these Special News Agency reports, and it was because of their rather stilted writing that the reporters on papers like The Day and The Sentinel and The Herald were sent sometimes over the same ground that the News Agency men had covered, to see if they could infuse some fresh interest into the story, or at all events to rewrite it, so that instead of each paper being uniform, it would strike its individual note in the presentation of news. The Special News Agency did for London and England what Reuter does for the world.

There was among the cluster of girls working at their typewriters one who looked up at Humphrey and smiled, as he waited for Beaver. She was not a particularly pretty girl, but there was a quality in her hair and eyes[111] and in the expression of her face that lifted it out of the commonplace. The mere fact that out of all the girls who were at work in the office, she alone left the memory of her face to Humphrey, is sufficient tribute to her personality.

She smiled—and Humphrey remembered that smile, and the hair, that was dull brown in shadow and gleaming with golden threads in the sunlight, and the eyes, that were either grey or blue, and very large. And then, Beaver came and took him to lunch.

They went to a Fleet Street public-house, and lunched off steak and bubble-and-squeak for a shilling, and all through the lunch Humphrey was thinking of other things—especially a smile.

"Well," said Beaver, "got over your hump?"

"I suppose so," Humphrey answered. ("I wonder what her name is?")

"Life's not so bad when you get used to it?" Beaver remarked, contemplating his inky thumbs. "The trouble is that just as you're getting used to it, it's time to die. Eh?"

Humphrey's thoughts were wandering again. ("I believe those eyes were saying something to me?") Beaver continued in his chatter, and occasionally Humphrey, catching the sense of his last few words, agreed with a mechanical "Yes," or a nod ("Why did she smile at me?"), and at last he blurted out, "I say, Beaver, what's the name of the girl that sits nearest the door in your office?"

"O lord! I don't know their names," said Beaver; "I've got other things to think about. What d'you want to know for?"

"She's like some one I knew in Easterham," Humphrey replied, glibly.

"I'll find out for you, if you like."

"No—don't bother. It doesn't matter at all."

[112]

The next day he was walking down Fleet Street when he perceived her looming through the crowd. He was conscious of a queer emotion that attacked him, a sudden dryness of the throat, and a quickening of all the pulses of his body. His whole being became swiftly taut: he almost stood still. And, as she bore down upon him, he saw that she was not so tall as he had imagined, but her face looked divinely attractive under the shadow of the spreading hat, and because the sun was shining her hair glittered like a halo. Now, she was close to him, and he found himself praying to God that she would look at him, and smile again; and the next moment he felt that the ground would sink beneath him if she did so, and he longed to look the other way, but could not. The people passing to and fro knew nothing of the terrific disturbance that was going on in the mind of the young man walking down Fleet Street. Now they were level—he raised his hat—it was over, and the memory of her smile had sunk yet deeper within him. Yes, she had remembered him, and nodded to him, and that smile—what did it mean? It was not an enticing smile, it was an almost imperceptible movement of the closed lips, yet it held some magic in it. It seemed to him that though they had never spoken, she knew all about him; she came across his life, smiling in silence, and he was aware that something triumphant and fresh had come into his life, with her passing, just as he knew for a certainty that, before long, he would learn the secret of her smile, when he spoke to her.

He went back to work, curiously elated and happy for no reason at all that he could understand. Things were unaltered, and yet, somehow or other, they were different. He felt, suddenly, as if years had been added to his age; he felt that he had met something real in life at last, and, when he came to analyse it, it was[113] nothing but an intangible smile, and the glance of two grey eyes.

That night, as he was on his way home, he chanced to meet Wratten. This tall man with the high forehead and curly hair was one of the puzzles of the office. He was a man who held aloof from his fellows, and because of that, the............