cuts across the hush, and,

"What a lark!" answers a deeper bass.

He is a very important and highly conventional personage, nowadays,
that slender pink dandy, with five grown daughters and a Constituency;
but if by any odd chance he should read this, I will wager he forgets
what he is actually looking at for a moment and sees against the black
shadows and rising night fog of Trafalgar Square a beautiful,
black-robed woman in red corals lifted to an empty barrow by two eager
club-dandies and held there by a gigantic Guardsman--the best fencer
in Europe, once!

Oh, Bertie, the Right Honourable now, the always honourable then, do
you know that there were tears on your pink cheeks? And your noble
friend, who broke up his establishment in St. John's Wood the next day
and founded the Little Order of the Sons of St. Francis, does he know
that the lightning stroke that blinded him like Saul of Tarsus and
sent him reeling from Piccadilly to the slums, lighted for a moment,
as it fell, the way of a dazed, rheumatic bachelor from America, who
saw the terror in his eyes and the sweat on his forehead as he held
his corner of the barrow and Margarita drove him to his God?

"Ev'ry _hour_ I _need_ Thee ..."

The fog rolls over us, the lights flare through a sea of mist; the
Honourable Bertie produces a hansom, from his pocket apparently, and
the wild, dark etching is wiped out like a child's picture on a slate.

Margarita falls asleep on my shoulder, I gain my usual philosophical
control, gradually, and realise, now the echoes of that agonised
pleading have ceased to disturb my soul, that the woman beside me is
not even a Christian, technically speaking, and knew not, literally,
what she did!

The magic of the Golden Voice--ah, what magic can cope with it? Of all
the pictures hers has painted for me on those miraculous, grey-tissued
walls where memory lives, this strange coarse-tinted sketch--a very
Hogarth in its unsparing contrasts--stands out the clearest. At night,
when I close my eyes and think "London," then does that poor sister of
the streets moan to me that "Gawd's frightful hard on women," and
fight her way to Margarita--who has been favoured beyond most women,
and knows not God--at least, not that implacable deity of the London
slum! Whenever I hear or read the phrase "Salvation Army" then do I
see a young exquisite with a white camellia in his buttonhole, gazing
like a hypnotised Indian Seer at a crude transpa