That night, in a little box of a flat in Hampstead, a man was fighting his last battle, with the fingers of Death at his throat and the arm of Love for his support. It was a sharp, short battle, ended when the night itself finished, and the dawn came through the chinks in the shutters, as pale and as cold as a ghost.

This was the end of Leonard Wratten, whom so few people understood, who had always kept his own counsel, so that only he himself knew of his own struggles and ambitions—they were just like Humphrey's, just like those of every other man in the Street. He had not asked much of life, and all that he asked for was given him, and then snatched away.

They talked about it in the Pen Club, and in the offices. "Overwork," they whispered. "He was just married." Ferrol rose to the occasion: wrote handsome cheques for Mrs Wratten, straightened out affairs, sent he............