pour allecher le client,
  Le camelot toujours cocasse
  En s'eventant d'un air bonasse
  Envoi' ce petit boniment: And then, with a swing and go, she sang the chorus--          Ca va, ca vient,
  Ca donn' de l'air, ca fait du bien.
  C'est vraiment magnifique.
  Quel instrument magique!
          Ca va, ca vient,
  Ca donn' de l'air et du maintien
  Et ca ne coute presque rien:
  Voici l'eventail parisien!

Hardly had she concluded the final line when the door opened and a tall, dark-haired, good-looking young man entered, crossed to her, and, placing his hand upon her shoulder, bent and kissed her fondly.

"Why, Jack, dear--you really are late!" the girl exclaimed.  "Were you kept at the office?"

"Yes, dearest," was his answer.  "Or rather I had some work that I particularly wanted to finish, so I stayed behind."

He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a pair of keen, merry brown eyes, a handsome face with high, intelligent brow, as yet unlined by care, a small, dark moustache, and a manner as courteous towards a woman as any diplomat accredited to the Court of St James.

Jack Sainsbury, though merely an employee of the Ochrida Copper Corporation, a man who went by "Tube" to the City each morning and returned each night to the modest little flat in Heath Street, at which his sister Jane acted as housekeeper for him, was an honest, upright Englishman who had, in the first month of the war, done his duty and gone to the recruiting office of the Honourable Artillery Company to enlist.

A defective elbow-joint had prevented him passing the doctor. And though no one in the office knew he had tried to join the new army, he had returned to the City and continued his soul-killing avocation of adding figures and getting out totals.

His meeting with Elise Shearman was not without its romantic side.

One Sunday morning, two years before, he had been riding his motor-cycle up to Hatfield, as was his habit, to meet at the Red Lion--that old inn that is the rendezvous of all motor-cyclists--the men and women who come out there each Sunday morning, wet or fine, from London. Fine cars, driven 

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