ied, drawing back, 'you _don't_ mean to tell me you're going to ask
the first young man you meet in an omnibus to marry you?'

[Illustration: I AM GOING OUT, SIMPLY IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURE.]

I shrieked with laughter, 'Elsie,' I cried, kissing her dear yellow
little head, 'you are _impayable_. You never will learn what I mean. You
don't understand the language. No, no; I am going out, simply in search
of adventure. What adventure may come, I have not at this moment the
faintest conception. The fun lies in the search, the uncertainty, the
toss-up of it. What is the good of being penniless--with the trifling
exception of twopence--unless you are prepared to accept your position
in the spirit of a masked ball at Covent Garden?'

'I have never been to one,' Elsie put in.

'Gracious heavens, neither have I! What on earth do you take me for? But
I mean to see where fate will lead me.'

'I may go with you?' Elsie pleaded.

'Certainly _not_, my child,' I answered--she was three years older than
I, so I had the right to patronise her. 'That would spoil all. Your dear
little face would be quite enough to scare away a timid adventure.' She
knew what I meant. It was gentle and pensive, but it lacked initiative.

So, when we had finished that wall, I popped on my best hat, and popped
out by myself into Kensington Gardens.

I am told I ought to have been terribly alarmed at the straits in which
I found myself--a girl of twenty-one, alone in the world, and only
twopence short of penniless, without a friend to protect, a relation to
counsel her. (I don't count Aunt Susan, who lurked in ladylike indigence
at Blackheath, and whose counsel, like her tracts, was given away too
profusely to everybody to allow of one's placing any very high value
upon it.) But, as a matter of fact, I must admit I was not in the least
alarmed. Nature had endowed me with a profusion of crisp black hair, and
plenty of high spirits. If my eyes had been like Elsie's--that liquid
blue which looks out upon life with mingled pity and amazement--I might
have felt as a girl ought to feel under such conditions; but having
large dark eyes, with a bit of a twinkle in them, and being as well able
to pilot a bicycle as any girl of my acquaintance, I have inherited or
acquired an outlook on the world which distinctly leans rather towards
cheeriness than despondency. I croak with difficulty. So I accepted my
plight as an amusing experience, affording full scope for the