The Man Who Bought London | Page 5

easily. "Not that I'm afraid of
dying, but when I think of the thousands of human beings whose future
rests upon me and my life--why my hair goes up every time I cross the
street."
He was not asking her to be interested in himself. She felt that he was
just voicing a thought that had occurred to him in a simple, natural way.
She looked at him with greater interest.
"I've just been buying a lunatic asylum," he said, and with an inquiring
lift of his eyebrows, which at once asked permission and offered thanks
when it was granted, he lit a cigar.
She stared at him and he laughed.
Whilst suspicion was gathering in her eyes, the train came hissing into
the station.
The girl saw with dismay that it was crowded, and the mob which
besieged each doorway was ten deep.
"You won't catch this," said the man calmly. "There'll be another in a
minute."
"I'm afraid I must try," said the girl, and hurried along to where the
surging throng were struggling to get aboard.
Her strange companion followed with long strides, but even with his
assistance there was no chance of obtaining foothold, and she was left
behind with a score of others. "Time's money," said the grey-haired
stranger cheerfully. "Don't be mean with it!"
"I can't afford to be anything else," said the girl, pardonably
exasperated. "Possibly you haven't to face the wrath of an employer
with a watch in his hand and doom on his face."
She laughed a little in spite of her vexation.

"I'm so sorry," she pleaded; "but I did not intend allowing myself the
luxury of a grumble about my worries--you were saying you have
bought a lunatic asylum."
He nodded, a twinkle in his eye.
"And you were thinking I had just escaped from one," he said
accusingly. "Yes, I've just bought the Coldharbour Asylum--lock, stock,
and barrel--"
She looked at him incredulously.
"Do you mean that?" she asked, and her scepticism was justified, for
the Coldharbour Asylum is the largest in London, and the second
largest in the world.
"I mean it," he said. "I am going to build the cutest residential club in
London on that site."
There was no time to say any more. Another train came in and, escorted
by the grey-haired man, who in the shortest space of time had assumed
a guardianship over her which was at once comforting and
disconcerting, she found a seat in a smoking carriage. It was so easy to
chat with him, so easy to confide hopes and fears which till that
moment she had not put into words.
She found herself at Oxford Circus all too soon, and oblivious of the
fact that the hands of the station clock pointed to twenty minutes after
nine. "A sheep as a lamb," said her footsteps hollowly, as she went
leisurely along the vaulted passage-way to the lift.
"Were you going to Oxford Circus?" she asked, suddenly seized with a
fear that she had taken this purchaser of lunatic asylums out of his way.
"Curiously enough, I was," he said. "I'm buying some shops in Oxford
Street at half-past nine."
Again she shot a swift glance at him, and he chuckled as he saw her

shrink back a little.
"I am perfectly harmless," he said mockingly.
They stepped out into Argyll Street together, and he offered his hand.
"I hope to meet you again," he said, but did not tell her his name--it was
King Kerry--though, he had read hers in the book she was carrying.
She felt a little uncomfortable, but gave him a smiling farewell. He
stood for some time looking after her.
A man, unkempt, with a fixed, glassy look in his eye, had been
watching the lift doors from the opposite side of the street. He started to
cross as the grey-haired stranger made his appearance. Suddenly two
shots rang out, and a bullet buzzed angrily past the grey man's face.
"That's yours, Mister!" howled a voice, and the next instant the owner
was grabbed by two policemen.
A slow smile gathered at the corners of the grey man's lips.
"Horace," he said, and shook his head disapprovingly, "you're a rotten
shot!"
On the opposite side of Oxford Street, a man watched the scene from
the upper window of a block of offices.
He saw the racing policemen, the huge crowd which gathered in a
moment, and the swaying figures of the officers of the law and their
half-mad prisoner. He saw, too, a grey-haired man, unharmed and calm,
slowly moving away, talking with a sergeant of police who had arrived
on the scene at the moment. The watcher shook a white fist in the
direction of King Kerry.
"Some day, my friend!" he said between his