remark. We are not all birds of
prey, dear ladies, believe me. Indeed, since you have undertaken the
responsibilities of the literary dissecting-room so thoroughly and
increasingly; since you have, as one might say, at last freed your
minds to us in the amazing frankness of your multitudinous and
unsparing pages, I am greatly tempted to wonder if you are not
essentially less decent than we. One would never have ventured to
suspect it, had you not opened the door....

The woman threw back her veil so that it framed her face like a cloud
and Roger looked straight into her eyes. And so the curtain rolled up,
the orchestra ceased its irrelevant pipings and the play was begun.

CHAPTER II

FATE GOES A-FISHING

Roger told me afterward that he literally could not say if it were
five seconds or five minutes that he looked into the girl's eyes. He
has since leaned to the opinion that it was nearer five minutes,
because even the news-woman stared at him and the passing street boys
had already begun to collect. Some subconscious realisation of this
finally enabled him to drag his eyes away, very much as one drags
himself awake when he must, and to realise the picture he presented--a
dazed man confronting an extraordinarily lovely girl with her fist
full of banknotes on a Broadway kerbstone. An interested cabby caught
his eye, wagged his whip masterfully, wheeled up to them and with an
apparently complete grasp of the situation whirled them off through a
side street with never so much as a "Where to, sir?"

And so he found himself alone with an unknown beauty in a hansom cab,
for all the world like a mysterious hero of melodrama, and Roger hated
melodrama and was never mysterious in all his life, to say nothing of
disliking mystery in anyone connected with him. He says he was
extremely angry at this juncture and I believe him.

"What is your name?" he asked shortly. "Have you no parents or friends
to protect you from the consequences of this crazy performance? Where
do you live?"

"My name is Margarita," she replied directly and pleasantly, "I never
had but one parent and he died a few days ago. I live by the sea."

An ugly thrill shot down his spine. No healthy person likes to be
alone with a mad woman, and under a brilliant fleeting light he
studied her curiously only to receive the certain conviction that
whatever his companion might be, she was not mad. Her slate-blue eyes
were calm and bright, her lips rathe