even if it only carries you as far as the silk gown of a Q.C.I suppose I ought now to write "K.C." A few years ago we all thought the State would go to pieces when Victoria died.

Yet you see we are jogging along pretty well under King Edward.

In the same way, you will soon get so used to the new Head Clerk, Mrs.
Claridge, that you will wonder what on earth you saw to admire in VIVIEN WARREN.
This letter came like a cricket ball between the eyes to Bertie Adams.

His adored Miss Warren going away and no clear prospect of her return--her farewell almost like the last words on a death-bed....
He bowed his head over his folded arms on his office desk, and gave way to gruff sobs and the brimming over of tear and nose glands which is the grotesque accompaniment of human sorrow.
He forgot for a while that he was a young man of nineteen with an unmistakable moustache and the status of a cricket eleven captain.
He was quite the boy again and his feeling for Vivien Warren, which earlier he had hardly dared to characterize, out of his intense respect for her, became once more just filial affection.
His good mother was a washerwoman-widow, in whom Honoria Fraser had interested herself in her Harley Street girlhood.

Bertie was the eldest of six, and his father had been a coal porter who broke his back tumbling down a cellar when a little "on." Bertie--he now figured as Mr.Albert Adams in the cricket lists--was a well-grown youth, rather blunt-featured, but with honest hazel eyes, fresh-coloured, shock-haired.