, but
that I should feel for you.'

'What sort of----'

'Oh, oddities, uglinesses--things that abound, I'm told, at all men's
meetings, and that yet, somehow, we'd like to eliminate from women's
quite on the old angel theory. No, I won't take you!'

CHAPTER XIII

The following afternoon, at half-past five, the carelessly dressed,
rather slouching figure of Lord Borrodaile might have been seen walking
along the Thames Embankment in the neighbourhood of Pimlico Pier. He
passed without seeing the only other person visible at that quiet
hour--one of the 'unemployed,' like himself, but save in that respect
sufficiently unlike the Earl of Borrodaile was the grimy, unshaven tramp
collapsed in one corner of the double-seated municipal bench. Lord
Borrodaile's fellow-citizen leaned heavily on one of the stout scrolls
of ironwork which, repeated at regular intervals on each side, divided
the seat into six compartments. No call for any one to notice such a
man--there are so many of them in these piping times of peace and
prosperity. Then, too, they go crawling about our world protected from
notice, as the creatures are who take their colouring from bark or leaf
or arctic snows. So these other forms of life, weather-beaten,
smoke-begrimed, subdued to the hues of the dusty roads they travel, and
the unswept spaces where they sleep--over these the eye glides unseeing.

As little interested in the gentleman as the gentleman was in him, the
wastrel contemplated the river with grimly speculative eye. But when
suddenly Borrodaile's sauntering figure came to a standstill near the
lower end of the bench, the tramp turned his head and watched dully the
gloveless hands cross one over the other on the knob of the planted
umbrella; the bent head; one hand raised now, groping about the
waistcoat, lighting upon what it sought and raising a pince-nez, through
which he read the legend scrawled in chalk upon the pavement. With a
faint saturnine smile Lord Borrodaile dropped the glass, and took his
bearings. He consulted his watch, and walked on.

Upon his return a quarter of an hour later, he viewed the same
little-alluring prospect from the opposite side of the street. The tramp
still stared at the river, but on his side of the bench, at the other
end, sat a lady reading a book. Between the two motionless figures and
the parapet, a group of dirty children were wrangling. Lord Borrodaile
crossed the wide street and paused a moment ju