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"At last, at long last!" cried Mr. Blake, Lord Stranleigh's exuberant secretary, as he waved aloft a letter he had just taken out of its envelope.

Blake sang these lines in a deep bass voice, and Stranleigh looked up from his newspaper with the slightest possible trace of annoyance on his brow.

"I knew it would come, for it was written. It was bound to come."

"What was bound to come?" demanded Stranleigh. "If you refer to your own dementia, it hasn't come. It was here long ago."

"It is a cloud no bigger than a lady's hand—most suitable phrase that, 'a lady's hand'—but