She looked at me queerly—deedily is the word—and, almost in a whisper, she asked, "Why don't you go to her?"

I leant back in my chair and laughed.

"What, become a Don Quixote!" said I. "Go out and tilt at windmills, try to pose knight-errant to a child who's lost her heart to some one else! What's the good of saving any woman from her own infatuation? She'll only hate you for it."

She looked me strangely in the face.

"She'll thank you for it one day," she said, and there were whole years of terror in her voice.

Suddenly, then, I saw things different, and at that moment came Moxon into the room.

"The 'taxi' for the lady," said he.

CHAPTER IV

Not only has Moxon his ideas about me; he has also his ideas about women.

Not

"They're a strange lot of people," he said once to me, meaning women, but as if they were all huddled together in waiting down in the hall.

"By which you mean?" said I.

"By which I mean, sir, that my sister Amy has thrown off the man she was engaged to and has taken to religion."

That was not telling me much what he meant. I doubt if he really knew himself. In all probability it was that he had come violently to the conclusion that he knew nothing whatever about them, in which case a man will speak knowingly of women in non-committal terms.

In the same diplomatic way, I knew he must be thinking a great deal with every blast of that whistle out in the street, and doubtless in the same diplomatic way, he would express it later.

I returned therefore with a certain amount of expectancy to my room as soon as the "taxi" had driven off and that poor little creature had vanished away into the grey heart of her world in Bloomsbury. There was that which I had slipped into her purse which might pay for the fare and perhaps a hat as well. God knows what hats cost, for I do not. Wherefore, when I put my 

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