CHAPTER I

A MEETING OF THE ORDER A man in a fur-lined overcoat--thin, shrunken, and worn--stood on the pavement in a little street in Camberwell, looking about him in evident disgust. Before him stretched a long row of six-roomed houses, smoke-begrimed, hideously similar, hideously commonplace. The street was empty save for the taxi-cab from which he had just alighted, and which was now vanishing in a slight fog, a milkman and a greengrocer's boy in amicable converse, and a few dirty children playing in the gutter. Nothin…