cident may serve to show.

He had taken one of those uncomfortable private omnibuses, where the
passengers are left in unlightened gloom. He sat by the door, and,
occupied as he was by his own misfortunes, paid little attention to his
surroundings.

But by-and-by, he became aware that the conductor, in collecting the
fares, was trying to attract the notice of some one who sat in the
further corner of the vehicle. "Where are you for, lady, please?" he
asked repeatedly, and at last, "_Will_ somebody ask the lady up the end
where I'm to set her down?" to all of which the eccentric person
addressed returned no reply whatever.

Leander's attention was thus directed to her; but, although in the
obscurity he could make out nothing but a dim form of grey, his nerves
were so unsettled that he felt a curiously uneasy fancy that eyes were
being fixed upon him in the darkness.

This continued until a moment when some electric lights suddenly flashed
into the omnibus as it passed, and lit up the whole interior with a
ghastly glare, in which the grey female became distinctly visible.

He caught his breath and shrank into the corner; for in that moment his
excited imagination had traced a strange resemblance to the figure he
had left in Rosherwich Gardens. The inherent improbability of finding a
classical statue seated in an omnibus did not occur to him, in the state
his mind was in just then. He sat there fascinated, until lights shone
in once more, and he saw, or thought he saw, the figure slowly raise her
hand and beckon to him.

That was enough; he started up with a smothered cry, thrust a coin into
the conductor's hand, and, without waiting for change, flung himself
from the omnibus in full motion.

When its varnished sides had ceased to gleam in the light of the lamps,
and its lumbering form had been swallowed up in the autumn haze, he
began to feel what a coward his imagination had made of him.

"My nightmare's begun already," he thought. "Still, she was so
surprisingly like, it did give me a turn. They oughtn't to let such
crazy females into public conveyances!"

Fortunately his panic had not seized him until he was within a short
distance from Bloomsbury, and it did not take him long to reach Queen
Square and his shop in the passage. He let himself in, and went up to a
little room on an upper floor, which he used as his sitting-room. The
person who "looked after him" did not sleep on the premises; but she
had laid