ed him about it
so often. The police won't listen to it but I am absolutely certain that
he was robbed. I noticed when he paid the bill that he had a great wad
of bank-notes which were never discovered afterwards."

Francis rose to his feet.

"What are you doing to-night?" he enquired.

"Nothing," she acknowledged eagerly.

"Then let's dine somewhere and see the show at the Frivolity," he
suggested.

"You dear man!" she assented with enthusiasm. "The one thing I wanted to
do, and the one person I wanted to do it with."

CHAPTER XII

It was after leaving Miss Daisy Hyslop's flat that the event to which
Francis Ledsam had been looking forward more than anything else in the
world, happened. It came about entirely by chance. There were no taxis
in the Strand. Francis himself had finished work for the day, and
feeling disinclined for his usual rubber of bridge, he strolled
homewards along the Mall. At the corner of Green Park, he came face to
face with the woman who for the last few months had scarcely been out of
his thoughts. Even in that first moment he realised to his pain that she
would have avoided him if she could. They met, however, where the path
narrowed, and he left her no chance to avoid him. That curious impulse
of conventionality which opens a conversation always with cut and dried
banalities, saved them perhaps from a certain amount of embarrassment.
Without any conscious suggestion, they found themselves walking side by
side.

"I have been wanting to see you very much indeed," he said. "I even went
so far as to wonder whether I dared call."

"Why should you?" she asked. "Our acquaintance began and ended in
tragedy. There is scarcely any purpose in carrying it further."

He looked at her for a moment before replying. She was wearing black,
but scarcely the black of a woman who sorrows. She was still frigidly
beautiful, redolent, in all the details of her toilette, of that
almost negative perfection which he had learnt to expect from her. She
suggested to him still that same sense of aloofness from the actualities
of life.

"I prefer not to believe that it is ended," he protested. "Have you so
many friends that you have no room for one who has never consciously
done you any harm?"

She looked at him with some faint curiosity in her immobile features.

"Harm? No! On the contrary, I suppose I ought to thank you for your
evidence at the inquest."

"Some part of it was the truth," he repl