and. It doesn't matter, anyhow."

"Please," said Raleigh. He saw that she wanted to get rid of him, and
he had no intention of letting her do so. "It matters to me, at any
rate. But there is one thing I didn't understand."

She did not answer, gazing over her clasped hands at the water,
across whose level the spires and chimneys of the city bristled like
the skyline of a forest.

"It was while I was following you here, wondering whether I might
speak to you," he continued. "I was watching you as you went, and it
seemed to me that you were well, unhappy; in trouble or something.
And then, back there on the quay, I saw you open your purse and throw
it into the river."

He paused. "There was a hole in it," said Annette shortly, without
turning her head.

"But" he spoke very quietly "you are in trouble? Yes, I know I'm
intruding upon you" she had moved her shoulders impatiently "but
haven't you given me just the shadow of a right? Your gift it might
have saved my life if I'd been what you thought; I might have fetched
up in the Morgue before morning. Men do, you know, every day women,
too!" Her fingers upon the parapet loosened and clasped again at
that. "You can't tie me hand and foot with such an obligation as that
and leave me plante la."

"Oh!" Annette sighed. "It's nothing at all," she said. "But, as you
want so much to know I'm a typist; I'm out of work; I've been looking
for it all day, and I'm disappointed and very tired."

"And that's really all?" demanded Raleigh.

"All!" She turned to look at him at last, meeting his steady and
penetrating eyes quietly. She had an impulse to tell him what was
comprehended in that "all"; to speak deliberately plain words that
should crumple him into an understanding of her tragedy. But even
while she hesitated there came to her a sense that he knew more than
he told; that the grey eyes in the red-brown face had read more of
her than she was willing to show. She subsided.

"Yes, that's all," she said.

He nodded, a quick and business-like little jerk of the head. "I see.
I've been worrying you, I'm afraid; but I'm glad I made you tell,
because I can put that all right for you at once, as it happens."

The girl, leaning on the wall, drew in a harsh breath and turned to
him. Young Raleigh, who had written a monograph on engineering
stresses, had still much to learn about the stresses that contort and
warp the souls of men and women. He learned some of it then, when he