or had played it too well, which was worse. Garstin had been
unusually tiresome with his allusions to the Royal Academy and his
preposterous concentration on the Cora woman.

This brown stranger's gaze was really like manna falling from heaven in
a hungry land. She boldly returned the gaze, stared, trusting to her own
beauty. And as she stared she tried to sum up the stranger, and failed.
She guessed him a little over thirty, but not much. And there somehow,
after the quick, instinctive guess at his age, she stuck.

"Come on, Beryl!"

Garstin's deep strong voice startled her. At that moment she felt angry
with him for calling her by her Christian name, though he had done it
ever since they had first made friends--if they were friends--in Paris
two years ago, when he had come to have a look at her bronzes with a
French painter whom she knew well.

"You are going to walk back with me?"

"To be sure I am. He is devilish good looking, but he ought to be out of
those clothes."

"Dick!"

He smiled at her sardonically. She knew that he seldom missed anything,
but his sharp observation in the midst of the squash of people going
out of the cafe took her genuinely aback. And then he had got at her
thought, at one of her most definite thoughts at least, about the brown
stranger!

"You are disgustingly clever," she said, as they made their way out,
followed by the Georgians and their attendant cosmopolitans. "I believe
I dislike you for it to-night."

"Then take a cab home and I'll walk."

"No, thank you. I'd rather endure your abominable intelligence."

He smiled, curling up the left corner of his sensual mouth.

"Come on then. Don't bother about good-byes to all these fools. They'll
never stop talking if they once begin good-bying. Like sheep they don't
know how to get away from each other since they've been herded together.
Come on! Come on!"

He thrust an arm through hers and almost roughly, but forcibly, got her
away through the throng. As he did so she was pushed by, or accidentally
pushed against, several people. For a brief instant she was in contact
with a man. She felt his side, the bone of one of his hips. It was the
man who had looked at her in the cafe. She saw in the night the gleam
of his big brown eyes looking down into hers. Then she and Garstin were
tramping--Garstin always seemed to be tramping when he walked--over the
pavement of Regent Street.

"Catch on tight! Let's get across and down to Pic