and ascended to the fourth floor where he had his abode. He was feeling in excellent fettle after a pleasant dinner with some of his many friends, and as he started upward he hummed a melody from the music halls of another day. Thirty years ago it would have been most unusual for Galahad Threepwood to return home at so early an hour as this, for in his bohemian youth it had been his almost nightly custom to attend gatherings at the Pelican Club which seldom broke up till the milkman had begun his rounds—a practice to which he always maintained that he owed the superb health he enjoyed in middle age. 'It really is an extraordinary thing,' a niece of his had once said, discussing him with a friend, 'that anyone who has had as good a time as Gally has had can be so frightfully fit. Everywhere you look you see men who have led model lives pegging out in their thousands, while good old Gally, who was the mainstay of Haig and Haig for centuries and as far as I can make out never went to bed till he was fifty, is still breezing along as rosy and full of beans as ever.' But a man tends to slow up a little as the years go by, and he was not averse nowadays to an occasional quiet home evening.
