Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 24).djvu/539

Rh moment, is fifteen thousand miles away, and I'm feeling lonesome."

"THE OLD LADY RECEIVED IT WITH TEARS OF GRATITUDE."

He took out his card, wrote "The Cosy Corner Tea-Rooms, 8 p.m.," above his address, and put it into the old lady's hand. Before she had adjusted her glasses and read "Mr. James Bullen, Worrabinda, Australia," that eccentric individual was out of sight.

As he turned into Piccadilly someone clapped him on the shoulder.

"Halloa, Jimmy, my blooming millionaire!" cried a "gentleman in khaki." "Come to see the show, eh? But the show seems very much off."

"Good man, Eltham!" cried the Australian. "You're the very chap I want. Remember the last time we met in Pretoria, eh? Come and dine with me to-night at the Cosy Corner Tea-Rooms. Delightful placeawfully pretty girls"

"Glad to hear the place is all right, but you needn't tell me the girls are pretty. The are the Stanleys, my cousins, and I was going there this very moment to see EvaI mean to say to see them both. I'll dine with you with pleasure, but don't let me detain you now. I'll just run round and have a word with Evaand, of course, with Muriel, at once."

By the time James Bullen had once traversed the space between the Circus and Green Park, he had invited quite a number of people, choosing each of them for his or her respectable appearance as well as for a certain gleam of humanity in the eye. Amidst his invited guests was a bevy of charming girls under the escort of some attentive young men, a public school boy piloting two younger brothers, and an irascible old gentleman whom he had secured on the very steps of Walsingham House.

"My dear sir," he had said in reply to the old gentleman's peppery refusals, "this is a unique occasion. Our King lies ill, we are all in consequence very much depressed, and it is our duty to keep up each other's spirits. I am an Australian alone in London, and I am not going to believe my father's people mean to give me the cold shoulder. If you were ever to come out to Worrabinda, you bet we'd put you up and do you well, and meantime you won't allow me to dine alone?"

But there seemed little chance of solitary dinner for him. Between five minutes to eight and five minutes past the door of the Cosy Corner Tea-Rooms was perpetually on the click, and very nearly fifty people sat down to the inviting little tables.

Vol. xxiv.67.