en the
cab had halted, again he procrastinated with the handle of the door in
his hand.

"Where to?" the driver enquired for the second time.

"To Brompton Square," he ordered uncertainly.

The cab was already moving when he changed his mind. Standing up and
leaning out of the window, "No. To Chelsea," he shouted above the
throbbing of the engine. Then drawing out Maisie's crumpled letter, he
read from it the address.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE COMPLICATIONS OF MAISIE

I

Tabs was not very familiar with Chelsea. He had seen it from the river a
score of times, red-walled, umbrageous and old-fashioned. But of the
district itself he knew next to nothing, save that up to the war it had
been the favorite roosting-place of short-haired women and long-haired
men. He wondered whether Maisie's hair was short. He decided in the
negative. To have attracted three husbands in four and a half years she
must be outwardly conventional. An unconventional woman might persuade
one man to marry her, but not three in such rapid succession. She
probably belonged to the apparently harmless, sympathetic, sisterly,
domestic type. And yet she must be something more than conventional;
millions of merely conventional women lacked the prowess to anchor only
one man in all the years of their life, whereas, judging by the Adair
incident, Maisie had not yet completed her list of husbands. There was
an undefined danger in coming into contact with such a woman, which lent
this expedition to Chelsea an atmosphere of adventure.

Did she know for what purpose he was visiting her? If she did, she was a
bold woman--a strategist. Her position was strengthened by his coming to
her in the guise of an invited guest. Then he remembered that he had
made a bargain with himself to meet her with a mind unclouded by
prejudice.

He had been traveling mean thoroughfares, when suddenly the cab swung
into an old-world street of dignified respectability and turned again
abruptly into a tiny quadrangle of color-washed, stucco-fronted,
timbered houses. In the center was a lawn, surrounded with white posts
between which black painted chains hung in loops; the apparent intention
was to create the illusion of a village-green. Tabs entered instantly
into the spirit of the game--the littleness and childishness of the
attempt at quaintness. He liked the bijou privacy of the Court, its
greenness and tidiness, and the absurdity of the narrow windows which
glinted